Skyrmions for two-baryon systems

We survey the application of skyrmions to nucleon-nucleon forces, starting from general background material on the search for appropriate degrees of freedom (nucleonic, mesic, quark,...) for few-nucleon systems. We stress that skyrmions may offer a link in the chain from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as a theory of strong interactions on the one hand to nuclear structure on the other. We briefly consider possible extensions of the skyrmion approach to the strange sector, where one may treat, among other systems, NΛ, NΣ and ΛΛ forces.