The nucleon as a topological chiral soliton

Through topology, baryon charge ‘‘leaks’’ from a confinement region into a meson‐cloud region. This suggests that there is a sort of topological equivalence principle which renders the Skyrmion description with a zero bag radius physically equivalent to the chiral bag description with a non‐zero bag radius. The issue as to whether future nuclear physics experiments will reveal a ‘‘smoking‐gun’’ evidence for a quark presence in nuclei is discussed in light of this recently discovered topological structure.