  Most experimental observations of solitons are limited to one-dimensional
(1D) situations, where they are naturally stable. For instance, in 1D cold Bose
gases, they exist for any attractive interaction strength $g$ and particle
number $N$. By contrast, in two dimensions, solitons appear only for discrete
values of $gN$, the so-called Townes soliton being the most celebrated example.
Here, we use a two-component Bose gas to prepare deterministically such a
soliton: Starting from a uniform bath of atoms in a given internal state, we
imprint the soliton wave function using an optical transfer to another state.
We explore various interaction strengths, atom numbers and sizes, and confirm
the existence of a solitonic behaviour for a specific value of $gN$ and
arbitrary sizes, a hallmark of scale invariance.
