Spontaneous creation of skyrmions in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate the stability of a vortex ring in a miscible two-component Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a harmonic potential, where the vortex cores in the two components are initially overlapped. Solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation numerically, we find that the overlapped vortex rings in the two components are dynamically unstable against separation and that they can form linked vortex rings, resulting in a three-dimensional skyrmion. The parameter range for spontaneous skyrmion generation is determined by the Bogoliubov analysis