Neutron stars within the Skyrme model

Abstract: 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. 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 paper to review how they can be applied to the study of neutron stars allowing for a description by means of topological solitons. We will focus on different aspects as the equation of state or the mass-radius relation, where we find that high maximal masses are supported.