Solitary vortices supported by localized parametric gain

Abstract: We demonstrate the existence and stability of bright vortex solitons sustained by a ring-shaped parametric gain, for both focusing and defocusing Kerr nonlinearities in lossy optical media. With the defocusing nonlinearity, the vortices are stable at all values of the detuning parameter, while under the focusing nonlinearity their stability region is limited to some positive values of the detuning. Unstable vortices in the focusing medium transform into stable rotating azimuthons.