Propagation and annihilation of vortex pairs in a smoothly inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate

An asymptotic theory has been developed to describe the propagation and annihilation of vortex pairs in a smoothly inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate with the repulsive interaction between atoms. It has been shown that the trajectories of vortex pairs coincide with geometric-optical rays in an equivalent isotropic medium with the refractive index depending both on the density of the unperturbed inhomogeneous condensate and on the energy of structures under study. The transformation of vortex pairs to vortex-free quasisolitons and back has been described.