Stability of vortex solitons in the cubic-quintic model

We investigate one-parameter families of two-dimensional bright spinning solitons (ring vortices) in dispersive media combining cubic self-focusing and quintic self-defocusing nonlinearities. In direct simulations, the spinning solitons display a symmetry-breaking azimuthal instability, which leads to breakup of a soliton into a set of fragments, each being a stable nonspinning soliton. The fragments fly out tangentially to the circular crest of the original vortex ring. If the soliton's energy is large enough, the instability develops so slowly that the spinning solitons may be regarded as virtually stable ones, in accord with earlier published results. Growth rates of perturbation eigenmodes with different azimuthal quantum numbers are calculated as a function of the soliton's propagation constant kappa from a numerical solution of the linearized equations. As a result, a narrow (in terms Of K) stability window is found for extremely broad solitons with values of the spin s = 1 and 2. However, analytical consideration of a special perturbation mode in the form of a spontaneous shift of the soliton's central bubble (core of the vortex embedded in a broad soliton) demonstrates that even extremely broad solitons are subject to an exponentially weak instability against this mode. In actual simulations, a manifestation of this instability is found in a three-dimensional soliton with s = 1. In the case when the two-dimensional spinning solitons are subject to tangible azimuthal instability, the number of the nonspinning fragments into which the soliton splits is usually, but not always, equal to the azimuthal number of the instability eigenmode with the largest growth rate. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.