Dark spatiotemporal optical solitary waves in self-defocusing nonlinear media

Dark three-dimensional spatiotemporal solitons or the “dark light bullets” in the self-defocusing nonlinear media with equal diffraction and dispersion lengths are demonstrated analytically. Our results show that the main characteristic of the dark light bullets can be described by the cylindrical Korteweg–de Vries (CKdV) equation. The dark wave packets are composed of the single-layer and multilayer toroidal rings. For the multilayer rings, there exist small inner rings enclosed in a large ring-shaped toroidal structure, when one chooses different orders of the soliton solutions of the CKdV equation. The radius of dark ring solitons increases with the propagation distance. Present results provide a feasible method for controlling the fundamental structure of these beams in the self-defocusing nonlinear media.