Harmonic Map Analysis of SU(N) Gravitating Skyrmions

In this paper the SU(N) Einstein-Skyrme system is considered. We express the chiral field (which is not a simple embedding of the SU(2) one) in terms of harmonic maps. In this way, SU(N) spherical symmetric equations can be obtained easily for any $N$ and the gravitating skyrmion solutions of these equations can be studied. In particular, the SU(3) case is considered in detail and three different types of gravitating skyrmions with topological charge 4, 2 and 0, respectively, are constructed numerically. Note that the configurations with topological charge 0 correspond to mixtures of skyrmions and antiskyrmions.