The Skyrme Model for Baryons

We review the Skyrme model approach which treats baryons as solitons of an effective meson theory. We start out with a historical introduction and a concise discussion of the original two flavor Skyrme model and its interpretation. Then we develop the theme, motivated by the large $N_C$ approximation of QCD, that the {\it effective} Lagrangian of QCD is in fact one which contains just mesons of all spins. When this Lagrangian is (at least approximately) determined from the meson sector it should then yield a zero parameter description of the baryons. We next discuss the concept of chiral symmetry and the technology involved in handling the three flavor extension of the model at the collective level. This material is used to discuss properties of the light baryons based on three flavor meson Lagrangians containing just pseudoscalars and also pseudoscalars plus vectors. The improvements obtained by including vectors are exemplified in the treatment of the {\it proton spin puzzle}.Comment: Invited review for INSA-Book-2000 38 pages, 4 figures included via epsfi

Particle Conjugation and the 1/NC1/N_C Corrections to gAg_A

We impose the requirement that the isovector axial vector current for the soliton sector of the chiral quark model transforms correctly under particle conjugation. This forces us to choose an otherwise arbitrary ordering of collective space operators in such a way that the next--to--leading $1/N_C$ correction to $g_A$ vanishes.Comment: 6 pages LaTeX, SU--4240--588, UNITU--THEP--23/199

Heavy Baryons with Strangeness in a Soliton Model

We present results from a chiral soliton model calculation for the spectrum of baryons with a single heavy quark (charm or bottom) and non-zero strangeness. We treat the strange components within a three flavor collective coordinate quantization of the soliton that fully accounts for light flavor symmetry breaking. Heavy baryons emerge by binding a heavy meson to the soliton. The dynamics of this heavy meson is described by the heavy quark effective theory with finite mass effects included.Comment: Ten pages, one figures, two tables, version to be published in PL

Spin and chiral stiffness of the XY spin glass in two dimensions

We analyze the zero-temperature behavior of the XY Edwards-Anderson spin glass model on a square lattice. A newly developed algorithm combining exact ground-state computations for Ising variables embedded into the planar spins with a specially tailored evolutionary method, resulting in the genetic embedded matching (GEM) approach, allows for the computation of numerically exact ground states for relatively large systems. This enables a thorough re-investigation of the long-standing questions of (i) extensive degeneracy of the ground state and (ii) a possible decoupling of spin and chiral degrees of freedom in such systems. The new algorithm together with appropriate choices for the considered sets of boundary conditions and finite-size scaling techniques allows for a consistent determination of the spin and chiral stiffness scaling exponents.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of the HFM2006 conference, to appear in a special issue of J. Phys.: Condens. Matte

Scaling Behavior in Soliton Models

In the framework of chiral soliton models we study the behavior of static nucleon properties under rescaling of the parameters describing the effective meson theory. In particular we investigate the question of whether the Brown--Rho scaling laws are general features of such models. When going beyond the simple Skyrme model we find that restrictive constraints need to be imposed on the mesonic parameters in order to maintain these scaling laws. Furthermore, in the case when vector mesons are included in the model it turns out that the isoscalar form factor no longer scales according to these laws. Finally we note that, in addition to the exact scaling laws of the model, one may construct approximate {\it local scaling laws}, which depend of the particular choice of Lagrangian parameters.Comment: 10 pages Latex, figures added using epsfi

Autoplot: A browser for scientific data on the web

Autoplot is software developed for the Virtual Observatories in Heliophysics to provide intelligent and automated plotting capabilities for many typical data products that are stored in a variety of file formats or databases. Autoplot has proven to be a flexible tool for exploring, accessing, and viewing data resources as typically found on the web, usually in the form of a directory containing data files with multiple parameters contained in each file. Data from a data source is abstracted into a common internal data model called QDataSet. Autoplot is built from individually useful components, and can be extended and reused to create specialized data handling and analysis applications and is being used in a variety of science visualization and analysis applications. Although originally developed for viewing heliophysics-related time series and spectrograms, its flexible and generic data representation model makes it potentially useful for the Earth sciences.Comment: 16 page