Solitons and solitary vortices in pancake-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates

We study fundamental and vortical solitons in disk-morphed Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) subject to strong confinement along the axial direction. Starting from the three-dimensional (3D) Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE), we proceed to an effective two-dimensional (2D) nonpolynomial Schrödinger equation (NPSE) derived by means of the integration over the axial coordinate. Results produced by the latter equation are in very good agreement with those obtained from the full 3D GPE, including cases when the formal 2D equation with the cubic nonlinearity is unreliable. The 2D NPSE is used to predict the density profiles and dynamical stability of repulsive and attractive BECs with zero and finite topological charges in various planar trapping configurations, including the axisymmetric harmonic confinement and one-dimensional periodic potential. In particular, we find a stable dynamical regime that was not reported before, viz., periodic splitting and recombination of trapped vortices with topological charges 2 or 3 in the self-attractive BEC.