Multidimensional solitons: Well-established results and novel findings

A brief review is given of some well-known and some very recent results obtained in studies of two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) solitons. Both zero-vorticity (fundamental) solitons and ones carrying vorticity S = 1 are considered. Physical realizations of multidimensional solitons in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and nonlinear optics are briefly discussed too. Unlike 1D solitons, which are typically stable, 2D and 3D ones are vulnerable to instabilities induced by the occurrence of the critical and supercritical collapse, respectively, in the same 2D and 3D models that give rise to the solitons. Vortex solitons are subject to a still stronger splitting instability. For this reason, a central problem is looking for physical settings in which 2D and 3D solitons may be stabilized. The review specifically addresses one well-established topic, viz., the stabilization of the 3D and 2D states, with S = 0 and 1, trapped in harmonic-oscillator (HO) potentials, and another topic which was developed very recently: the stabilization of 2D and 3D free-space solitons, which mix components with S = 0 and ± 1 (semi-vortices and mixed modes), in a binary system with the (pseudo-) spin-orbit coupling (SOC) between its components. The former model is based on the single cubic nonlinear Schrödinger/Gross-Pitaevskii equation (NLSE/GPE), while the latter one is represented by a system of two coupled GPEs. In both cases, the generic situations are drastically different in the 2D and 3D geometries. In the 2D settings, the stabilization mechanism creates a stable ground state (GS, which was absent without it), whose norm falls below the threshold value at which the critical collapse sets in. In the 3D geometry, the supercritical collapse does not allow to create a GS, but metastable solitons can be constructed.