Although it provides a relatively good picture of the nucleons, the Skyrme
Model is unable to reproduce the small binding energy in nuclei. This suggests
that Skyrme-like models that nearly saturate the Bogomol'nyi bound may be more
appropriate since their mass is roughly proportional to the baryon number A.
For that purpose, we propose a near-BPS Skyrme Model. It consists of terms up
to order six in derivatives of the pion fields, including the nonlinear and
Skyrme terms which are assumed to be relatively small. For our special choice
of mass term, we obtain well-behaved analytical BPS-type solutions with
constant baryon density configurations, as opposed to the more complex
shell-like configurations found in most extensions of the Skyrme Model. Fitting
the four model parameters, we find a remarkable agreement for the binding
energy per nucleon B/A with respect to experimental data. These results support
the idea that nuclei could be near-BPS Skyrmions.Comment: Matches version to bepublished in Nucl.Phys. B. arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:1205.141