  It is known that, in continuous media, composite solitons with hidden
vorticity, which are built of two mutually symmetric vortical components whose
total angular momentum is zero, may be stable while their counterparts with
explicit vorticity and nonzero total angular momentum are unstable. In this
work, we demonstrate that the opposite occurs in discrete media: hidden vortex
states in relatively small ring chains become unstable with the increase of the
total power, while explicit vortices are stable, provided that the
corresponding scalar vortex state is also stable. There are also stable mixed
states, in which the components are vortices with different topological
charges. Additionally, degeneracies in families of composite vortex modes lead
to the existence of long-lived breather states which can exhibit vortex charge
fipping in one or both components.
