HOT NUCLEONS IN CHIRAL SOLITON MODELS

Nucleons in a hot pion gas are studied within the framework of chiral soliton models which contain pions and also baryons as solitons of the same chiral action. The semiclassical treatment of the soliton soluti ons must be augmented by pionic fluctuations which requires renormaliz ation to one loop, and finite temperatures do not introduce new ultrav iolet divergencies and may easily be considered. Alternatively, a reno rmalization scheme based on the renormalization group equation at fini te temperature comprises and extends the rigorous results of chiral pe rturbation theory and renders the low-energy constants temperature dep endent, which allows the construction of temperature-dependent soliton s below the critical temperature. The temperature dependence of the ba ryon energy and the pion-nucleon coupling is studied. There is no simp le scaling law for the temperature dependence of these quantities.