Nonuniformly Filled Vortex Rings in Nonlinear Optics

A new type of long-lived solitary structures for paraxial optics with two circular polarizations of light in a homogeneous defocusing Kerr medium with an anomalous group velocity dispersion has been revealed numerically in the coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations. A found hybrid three-dimensional soliton is a vortex ring against the background of a plane wave in one of the components, and the core of the vortex is filled with another component nonuniformly in azimuth angle. The existence of such quasistationary structures with a reduced symmetry in a certain parametric region is due to the saturation of the so-called sausage instability caused by the effective surface tension of a domain wall between two polarizations.