This book presents, in the form of reviews by world's leading physicists in wide-ranging fields in theoretical physics, the influence and prescience of Skyrme's daring idea of 1960, originally conceived for nuclear physics, that fermions can arise from bosons via topological solitons, pervasively playing a powerful role in wide-ranging areas of physics, from nuclear/astrophysics, to particle physics, to string theory and to condensed matter physics.
The skyrmion description, both from gauge theory and from gauge/gravity duality, offers solutions to some long-standing and extremely difficult problems at high baryonic density, inaccessible by QCD proper. It also offers explanations and makes startling predictions for fascinating new phenomena in condensed matter systems. In both cases, what is at the core is the topology although the phenomena are drastically different, even involving different spacetime dimensions.
This second edition has been expanded with addition of new reviews and extensively updated to take into account the latest developments in the field.
