On the cubic and cubic-quintic optical vortices equations

An optical vortex can appear when a light beam with nonzero angular momentum propagates in a suitable nonlinear medium. In some situations has been observed that the light intensity vanish at the center of the vortex (where the phase of the electromagnetic field is undefined), while the light beam assumes a ring-shaped structure. In this paper we consider two classical cases in which such kind of phenomena occur: the case of the self focusing cubic nonlinearity, and the case of competing quintic and cubic nonlinearity. In both cases we study the nonlinear Schrödinger equation of the optical field (with various boundary conditions) by means of min-max methods, and we prove the existence of saddle point type solutions, as well as minimum type solutions.