Within the class of field theories with the field content of the Skyrme model, one submodel can be found which consists of the square of the baryon current and a potential term only. For this submodel, a Bogomol’nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield bound exists, and the static soliton solutions saturate this bound. Further, already on the classical level, this Bogomol’nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield Skyrme model reproduces some features of the liquid drop model of nuclei. Here, we investigate the model in more detail and, besides, we perform the rigid rotor quantization of the simplest Skyrmion (the nucleon). In addition, we discuss indications that the viability of the model as a low-energy effective field theory for QCD is further improved in the limit of a large number of colors $N_c$.

• Received 3 August 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.085015