Ring dark solitons in three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates

In this work we present a systematic study of the three-dimensional extension of the ring dark soliton, examining its existence, stability, and dynamics in isotropic harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensates. Detuning the chemical potential from the linear limit, the ring dark soliton becomes unstable immediately but can be fully stabilized by an external cylindrical potential. The ring has a large number of unstable modes which are analyzed through spectral stability analysis. Furthermore, a few typical destabilization dynamical scenarios are revealed with a number of interesting vortical structures emerging, such as the two or four coaxial parallel vortex rings. In the process of considering the stability of the structure, we also develop a modified version of the degenerate perturbation theory method for characterizing the spectra of the coherent structure. This semianalytical method can be reliably applied to any soliton with a linear limit to explore its spectral properties near this limit. The good agreement of the resulting spectrum is illustrated via a comparison with the full numerical Bogolyubov-de Gennes spectrum. The application of the method to the two-component ring dark-bright soliton is also discussed.