Coherent Cavitation in the Liquid of Light

We study the cubic- (focusing-)quintic (defocusing) nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation in two transverse dimensions. We discuss a family of stationary traveling waves, including rarefaction pulses and vortexantivortex pairs, in a background of critical amplitude. We show that these rarefaction pulses can be generated inside a flattop soliton when a smaller bright soliton collides with it. The fate of the evolution strongly depends on the relative phase of the solitons. Among several possibilities, we find that the dark pulse can reemerge as a bright soliton.