Three-dimensional spinning solitons in the cubic-quintic nonlinear medium.

Abstract

We find one-parameter families of three-dimensional spatiotemporal bright vortex solitons (doughnuts, or spinning light bullets), in bulk dispersive cubic-quintic optically nonlinear media. The spinning solitons display a symmetry-breaking azimuthal instability, which leads to breakup of the spinning soliton into a set of fragments, each being a stable nonspinning light bullet. However, in some cases the instability is developing so slowly that the spinning light bullets may be regarded as virtually stable ones, from the standpoint of an experiment with finite-size samples.