Modern Physics Letters B

Skyrmions are topological solitons that describe baryons within a nonlinear theory of pions. In holographic QCD, baryons correspond to topological solitons in a bulk theory with an extra spatial dimension. Thus, the three-dimensional Skyrmion lifts to a four-dimensional holographic Skyrmion in the bulk. We begin this review with a description of the simplest example of this correspondence, where the holographic Skyrmion is exactly the self-dual Yang–Mills instanton in flat space. This places an old result of Atiyah and Manton within a holographic framework and reveals that the associated Skyrme model extends the nonlinear pion theory to include an infinite tower of vector mesons, with specific couplings for a BPS theory. We then describe the more complicated curved space version that arises from the string theory construction of Sakai and Sugimoto. The basic concepts remain the same but the technical difficulty increases as the holographic Skyrmion is a curved space version of the Yang–Mills instanton, so self-duality and integrability are lost. Finally, we turn to a low-dimensional analog of holographic Skyrmions, where aspects such as multi-baryons and finite baryon density are amenable to both numerical computation and an approximate analytic treatment.

In a wide class of holographic models, like the one proposed by Sakai and Sugimoto, baryons can be approximated by instantons of non-Abelian gauge fields that live on the world-volume of flavor D-branes. In the leading order, those are just the Yang–Mills instantons, whose solutions can be constructed from the celebrated Atiyah–Drinfeld–Hitchin–Manin (ADHM) construction. This fact can be used to study various properties of baryons in the holographic limit. In particular, one can attempt to construct a holographic description of the cold dense nuclear matter phase of baryons. It can be argued that holographic baryons in such a regime are necessarily in a solid crystalline phase. In this review, we summarize the known results on the construction and phases of crystals of the holographic baryons.

Broken symmetry states characterizing density waves of higher angular momentum in correlated electronic systems are intriguing objects. In the scheme of characterization by angular momentum, conventional charge and spin density waves correspond to zero angular momentum. Here, we explore a class of exotic density wave states that have topological properties observed in recently discovered topological insulators. These rich topological density wave states deserve closer attention in not only high temperature superconductors but in other correlated electron states, as in heavy fermions, of which an explicit example will be discussed. The state discussed has nontrivial charge 2e skyrmionic spin texture. These skyrmions can condense into a charged superfluid. Alternately, they can fractionalize into merons and anti-merons. The fractionalized particles that are confined in skyrmions in the insulating phase, can emerge at a deconfined quantum critical point, which separates the insulating and the superconducting phases. These fractional particles form a two-component spin-singlet chiral $(d_{x^2-y^2}\pm i{d}_{xy})$ wave superconducting state that breaks time reversal symmetry. Possible connections of this exotic order to the superconducting state in the heavy-fermion material ${\text{URu}}_2{\text{Si}}_2$ are suggested. The direct evidence of such a chiral superconducting state is polar Kerr effect that was observed recently.

The history of modern condensed matter physics may be regarded as the competition and reconciliation between Stoner’s and Anderson’s physical pictures, where the former is based on momentum–space descriptions focusing on long wave-length fluctuations while the latter is based on real-space physics emphasizing emergent localized excitations. In particular, these two view points compete with each other in various nonperturbative phenomena, which range from the problem of high $T_c$ superconductivity, quantum spin liquids in organic materials and frustrated spin systems, heavy-fermion quantum criticality, metal-insulator transitions in correlated electron systems such as doped silicons and two-dimensional electron systems, the fractional quantum Hall effect, to the recently discussed Fe-based superconductors. An approach to reconcile these competing frameworks is to introduce topologically nontrivial excitations into the Stoner’s description, which appear to be localized in either space or time and sometimes both, where scattering between itinerant electrons and topological excitations such as skyrmions, vortices, various forms of instantons, emergent magnetic monopoles, and etc. may catch nonperturbative local physics beyond the Stoner’s paradigm. In this review paper, we discuss nonperturbative effects of topological excitations on dynamics of correlated electrons. First, we focus on the problem of scattering between itinerant fermions and topological excitations in antiferromagnetic doped Mott insulators, expected to be relevant for the pseudogap phase of high $T_c$ cuprates. We propose that nonperturbative effects of topological excitations can be incorporated within the perturbative framework, where an enhanced global symmetry with a topological term plays an essential role. In the second part, we go on to discuss the subject of symmetry protected topological states in a largely similar light. While we do not introduce itinerant fermions here, the nonperturbative dynamics of topological excitations is again seen to be crucial in classifying topologically nontrivial gapped systems. We point to some hidden links between several effective field theories with topological terms, starting with one-dimensional physics, and subsequently finding natural generalizations to higher dimensions.