Vortex Solitons and Rotating Azimuthons in Nonlinear Media

We give a brief overview of the recent advances in nonlinear singular optics that studies the propagation and stability of optical vortices in nonlinear media, with the emphasis on the properties of vortex solitons and rotating azimuthons. In general, self-focusing nonlinearity generates the azimuthal instability of vortex beams, but it can support novel types of stable (or metastable) self-trapped beams with a finite angular momentum, such as ring-like necklace beams and soliton clusters. In particular, we describe azimuthons and multi-vortex solitons which provide the generalization of the LaguerreGaussian and Hermite-Gaussian optical beams and demonstrate that many of such vortex-carrying beams can be stabilized in the media with nonlocal nonlinear response.