Fabrizio Canfora: “Cooking pasta with Lie groups”

Nuclear pasta is a phase of matter that appears organized in some ordered structures when a large number of Baryons is confined in a finite volume, such as in the crust of neutron stars. The relevant low-energy limit of QCD, whose strong non-linear inter- actions inhibit exact solutions, is then usually analyzed numerically within the Skyrme model at leading order in the ’t Hooft coupling.

From the mathematical viewpoint, this begs the question whether one can find analytic solutions of the (gauged) Skyrme model that describe typical configurations of the nu- clear pasta phase. I will show that there is a very interesting relation between Lie group theory and such families of solutions, which allows to generalize and classify previously known results in a much more general setting.