Breather solitons in highly nonlocal media

We present an overview of recent advances in the understanding of optical beams in nonlinear media with a spatially nonlocal nonlinear response. We discuss the impact of nonlocality on the modulational instability of plane waves, the collapse of finite-size beams, and the formation and interaction of spatial solitons.

The relation between optical beams propagation in strongly nonlocal nonlinear (SNN) media and {propagation} in free space is {demonstrated using} the technique of variable transformation. The governing equation, integral and analytical solutions, and propagation properties in free space can be directly transferred to their counterparts in SNN media through a one-to-one correspondence. The one-to-one correspondence together with the Huygens-Fresnel integral yields an efficient...

We put forward a strategy to achieve synthetic nonlinearities where local and nonlocal contributions compete on similar footing, thus yielding intermediate tunable responses ranging from fully local to strongly nonlocal. The physical setting addressed is a semiconductor material with both Kerr and thermal nonlinearities illuminated by a pulse train with suitable single-pulse width and repetition rate. We illustrate the potential of the scheme by showing that it supports solit...

In analogy to a perturbed harmonic oscillator, we calculate the fundamental and some other higher order soliton solutions of the nonlocal nonlinear Schroedinger equation (NNLSE) in the second approximation in the generally nonlocal case. Comparing with numerical simulations we show that soliton solutions in the 2nd approximation can describe the generally nonlocal soliton states of the NNLSE more exactly than that in the zeroth approximation. We show that for the nonlocal cas...

We report on the observation and quantitative assessment of self-trapped pulsating beams in a highly non-local nonlinear regime. The experiments were conducted in nematic liquid crystals and allow a meaningful comparison with the prediction of a scalar theory in the perturbative limit, while addressing the need for beyond-paraxial analytical treatments.

We find that a surface soliton in nonlocal nonlinear media can be regarded as a half of a bulk soliton with an antisymmetric amplitude distribution. The analytical solutions for the surface solitons and breathers in strongly nonlocal media are obtained, and the critical power and breather period are gotten analytically and confirmed by numerical simulations. In addition, the oscillating propagation of nonlocal surface solitons launched away from the stationary position is con...

Breathing solitons consist of a fast beating wave within a compact envelope of stable shape and velocity. They manifest themselves in a variety of contexts such as plasmas, optical fibers and cold atoms, but have remained elusive when energy conservation is broken. Here, we report on the observation of breathing, unidirectional, arbitrarily long-lived solitons in non-reciprocal, non-conservative active metamaterials. Combining precision desktop experiments, numerical simulati...

We investigate the propagation of the spatial soliton in cylindrical strongly nonlocal media by a novel method of image beam of light. The effect of the boundary on the soliton acting as the dynamic force for the soliton steering is equivalent to the force between the soliton beam and the image beam. The trajectory of the soliton is analytically studied which is in good agreement with the experimental results.

We analyze the existence, stability, and mobility of gap solitons (GSs) in a periodic photonic structure built into a nonlocal self-defocusing medium. Counter-intuitively, the GSs are supported even by a highly nonlocal nonlinearity, which makes the system quasi-linear. Unlike local models, the variational approximation (VA) predicts the GSs in a good agreement with numerical findings, due to the suppression of undulating tails of the solitons.

We address the stabilization of dipole solitons in nonlocal nonlinear materials by two different approaches. First, we study the properties of such solitons in thermal nonlinear media, where the refractive index landscapes induced by laser beams strongly depend on the boundary conditions and on the sample geometry. We show how the sample geometry impacts the stability of higher-order solitons in thermal nonlinear media and reveal that dipole solitons can be made dynami-cally ...