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Abstract
This thesis is devoted to a study of applications of non-linear sigma models to the Skyrme model and to string physics. In chapter 1 the background material is briefly reviewed. In chapter 2 it is shown that baryons carrying heavy flavors, such as strangeness and charm, can be described by bound states of the corresponding heavy mesons in the background field of the basic SU(2) skyrmion. In chapter 3 the applicability of the Skyrme model to the analysis of nuclear matter is discussed. An ansatz that describes a cubic skyrmion crystal is presented and studied numerically. Results are used to discuss nuclear matter in the large-N(,c) limit and at N(,c) = 3. In chapter 4 it is demonstrated that the beta functions of the nonlinear sigma models which describe strings propagating in background fields can be used to construct the generating functional for on-shell S-matrix elements of the associated string theories.
