Skyrmion approach to finite density and temperature

We review an approach, developed over the past few years, to describe hadronic matter at finite density and temperature, whose underlying theoretical framework is the Skyrme model, an effective low energy theory rooted in large $N_c$ QCD. In this approach matter is described by various crystal structures of skyrmions, classical topological solitons carrying baryon number, from which conventional baryons appear by quantization. Chiral and scale symmetries play a crucial role in the dynamics as described by pion, dilaton and vector meson degrees of freedom. When compressed or heated skyrmion matter describes a rich phase diagram which has strong connections with the confinement/deconfinement phase transition.