Existence of the positive composite optical vortices

Optical vortices as topological objects exist ubiquitously in nature. In this paper, we use the principle of variational method and mountain pass lemma to develop some existence theorems for the stationary vortex wave solution of a coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations, which describe the possibility of effective waveguiding of a weak probe beam via the cross‐phase modulation‐type interaction. The main goal is to obtain a positive solution, of minimal action if possible, with all vector components not identically zero. Additionally, as demanded by beam confinement, we prove the exponential decay of the soliton amplitude at infinity. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.