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Aloof Baby Skyrmions

We show that a suitable choice for the potential term in the two-dimensional baby Skyrme model yields solitons that have a short-range repulsion and a long-range attraction. The solitons are therefore aloof, in the sense that static multi-soliton bound states have constituents that preserve their individual identities and are sufficiently far apart that tail interactions yield small binding energies. The static multi-soliton solutions are found to have a cluster structure that is reproduced by a simple binary species particle model. In the standard three-dimensional Skyrme model of nuclei, solitons are too tightly bound and are often too symmetric, due to symmetry enhancement as solitons coalesce to form bound states. The aloof baby Skyrmion results endorse a way to resolve these issues and provides motivation for a detailed study of the related three-dimensional version of the Skyrme model.