Dark optical bullets in light self-trapping

Abstract
Dark optical bullets—the stationary states of pulsed (3 + 1)-dimensional dark self-trapped beams propagating in uniform self-defocusing Kerr-law media without change in space and time—are found possible in the anomalous dispersion region, and the states are shown to be stable. This contrasts with the corresponding light bullets in self-focusing media that collapse in Kerr-law nonlinearity. On the other hand, in the normal dispersion region the pulsed dark self-trapped beams break as a result of the combined effects of diffraction, dispersion, and nonlinearity.