The Skyrme model is a low energy effective field theory of strong interactions where nuclei and baryons appear as collective excitations of pionic degrees of freedom. Proposed by Tony Skyrme in the sixties, his ideas received further support when it was discovered that in the limit of the large number of colours of QCD, an effective theory of mesons arises.
In the last years, there has been a revival of Skyrme’s ideas and new related models, some of them with BPS bounds (topological lower energy bounds), have been proposed. It is the aim of this talk to present one of them, namely, the BPS Skyrme model, and to explore the nuclear world, from nuclei to neutron stars.
