Physics Letters B 752 (2016) 201–205
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Analytic self-gravitating Skyrmions, cosmological bounces and AdS
wormholes
Eloy Ayón-Beato, Fabrizio Canfora
∗
, Jorge Zanelli
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
4 November 2015
Received
in revised form 18 November 2015
Accepted
24 November 2015
Available
online 26 November 2015
Editor:
M. Cveti
ˇ
c
We present a self-gravitating, analytic and globally regular Skyrmion solution of the Einstein–Skyrme
system with winding number w =±1, in presence of a cosmological constant. The static spacetime
metric is the direct product R × S
3
and the Skyrmion is the self-gravitating generalization of the static
hedgehog solution of Manton and Ruback with unit topological charge. This solution can be promoted
to a dynamical one in which the spacetime is a cosmology of the Bianchi type-IX with time-dependent
scale and squashing coefficients. Remarkably, the Skyrme equations are still identically satisfied for all
values of these parameters. Thus, the complete set of field equations for the Einstein–Skyrme– system
in the topological sector reduces to a pair of coupled, autonomous, nonlinear differential equations
for the scale factor and a squashing coefficient. These equations admit analytic bouncing cosmological
solutions in which the universe contracts to a minimum non-vanishing size, and then expands. A non-
trivial
byproduct of this solution is that a minor modification of the construction gives rise to a family
of stationary, regular configurations in General Relativity with negative cosmological constant supported
by an SU(2) nonlinear sigma model. These solutions represent traversable AdS wormholes with NUT
parameter in which the only “exotic matter” required for their construction is a negative cosmological
constant.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
The Skyrme model [1] provides a useful description of nuclear
and particle physics in the low energy regime of QCD [2]. It allows
the existence of a particular class of solitons – Skyrmions – which
represent Fermionic states in spite of the fact that the basic fields
have spin zero. Skyrmions describe nucleons both theoretically and
phenomenologically, where the identification of the winding num-
ber
of the Skyrmion and the baryon number of particle physics
is an essential observation [2] (see, e.g. [3–5]). The possibility of
treating the Skyrmions as fermions has been recently extended
to curved spaces as well [6,7]. Following [8], spherically symmet-
ric
black-hole solutions with a nontrivial Skyrme field – Skyrme
“hair” – were found numerically in [9]. These are the first genuine
counterexamples to the “no-hair” conjecture; they are stable [10]
in
contrast with other “hairy” examples as the colored black holes
(see e.g., [11] for a review). Their regular particle-like counterparts
[12] and their dynamical properties have also been investigated
numerically in [13].
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: ayon-beato@fis.cinvestav.mx (E. Ayón-Beato), canfora@cecs.cl
(F. Canfora),
z@cecs.cl (J. Zanelli).
It would be very interesting and useful to go beyond numerical
approximations in order to have explicit examples of analytic self-
gravitating
Skyrmions, that is, exact solutions on a spacetime that
consistently solves the Einstein equations with the stress-energy
tensor of the Skyrmion as the source. In particular, its time evo-
lution
would help to understand the gravitational consequences of
having a discrete topological charge and the fact that these ob-
jects
have a characteristic size. Unfortunately, there is no known
analytic example of a four-dimensional self-gravitating configura-
tion
with non-vanishing topological charge. In fact, finding analytic
spherically symmetric Skyrmion solutions even without consider-
ing
their back-reaction to gravity is a highly non-trivial task [5].
The situation becomes even more difficult for the Einstein–Skyrme
system and the search for analytic self-gravitating solutions with
non-trivial topological charge may seem to be a problem beyond
reach.
Here
we show how to construct a self-gravitating Skyrmion in
presence of a cosmological constant. This seems to be the first an-
alytic
solution of the Einstein–Skyrme system with nonvanishing
winding number. In the static case, the spacetime metric is the
Cartesian product R × S
3
for the time direction and the spatial
slices, respectively.
The
solution can be additionally promoted to a time-dependent
one: a dynamical universe containing a self-gravitating Skyrmion.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2015.11.065
0370-2693/
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.