Vortex families near a spectral edge in the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with a two-dimensional periodic potential

Abstract

We examine numerically vortex families near band edges of the Bloch wave spectrum for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with two-dimensional periodic potentials and for the discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equation. We show that besides vortex families that terminate at a small distance from the band edges via fold bifurcations, there exist vortex families that are continued all the way to the band edges.