From skyrmions to the nucleon-nucleon potential

The nucleon-nucleon interaction is derived from interacting solitons in the Skyrme model. An introduction to the Skyrme model is given and the quantiz ation of Skyrmions in terms of collective degrees of freedom is described. An approach to study interacting Skyrmions is presented and numerical resul ts for the low-energy configurations are discussed. The nucleon-nucleon pot ential, obtained in perturbation theory, agrees semiquantitatively with phe nomenology.