Spatiotemporal chaos in chiral soliton models

In this paper, we study the chiral soliton models for baryons, from the viewpoint of classical nonlinear dynamical systems. In particular, we discuss (i) the Skyrme model, an effective Lagrangian model with purely mesonic degrees of freedom based on chiral symmetry, whose topological soliton solutions are identified with baryons, as well as (ii) a quark-meson model, in which the quark degrees of freedom are explicitly present. We consider fluctuations around the {ital B}=1 soliton solutions of these models and solve the spherically symmetric, time-dependent systems. Numerical studies indicate that the phase space around the Skyrme soliton solution exhibits spatiotemporal chaos. In contrast with this, the soliton of the quark-meson model is stable even for large perturbations. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society.}