  It is understood that the Skyrme model has a topologically interesting
baryonic excitation which can model nuclei. So far no stable knotted solutions,
of the Skyrme model, have been found. Here we investigate the dynamics of Hopf
solitons decaying to the vacuum solution in the Skyrme model. In doing this we
develop a matrix-free numerical method to identify the minimum eigenvalue of
the Hessian of the corresponding energy functional. We also show that as the
Hopf solitons decay, they emit a cloud of isospinning radiation.
