Monopoles and Knots in Skyrme Theory

Abstract

We show that the Skyrme theory is actually a theory of monopoles which allows a new type of soliton, the topological knot made of the monopole-antimonopole pair, which is different from the well-known skyrmion. Furthermore, we derive a generalized Skyrme action from the Yang-Mills action of QCD, which we propose to be an effective action of QCD in the infrared limit. We discuss the physical implications of our results.