Nucleons as chiral solitons

In the limit of large number of colors N the nucleon consisting of N quarks is heavy, and one can treat it semiclassically, like the large-Z Thomas--Fermi atom. The role of the semiclassical field binding the quarks in the nucleon is played by the pion or chiral field; its saddle-point distribution inside the nucleon is called the chiral soliton. The old Skyrme model for this soliton is an over-simplification. One can do far better by exploiting a realistic and theoretically-motivated effective chiral lagrangian presented in this paper. As a result one gets not only the static characteristics of the nucleon in a fair accordance with the experiment (such as masses, magnetic moments and formfactors) but also much more detailed dynamic characteristics like numerous parton distributions. We review the foundations of the Chiral Quark-Soliton Model of the nucleon as well as its recent applications to parton distributions, including the recently introduced `skewed' distributions, and to the nucleon wave function on the light cone.