Chapter 4: Soliton Families in Strongly Nonlocal Media
Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shunde Polytechnic, Guangdong Province, Shunde, China
Milivoj R. Beli
Science Program, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Doha, Qatar
4.1 Introduction
Spatial optical solitons are nondiffracting light beams propagating without change in nonlinear (NL)—and sometimes nonlocal—media. Spatial optical solitons in nematic liquid crystals (NLCs)—nematicons—can propagate unchanged for long distances because the strong nonlocal nonlinearity can saturate the change in the material refractive index; this makes them suitable for all optical applications. In this chapter, we theoretically address and numerically describe various spatial soliton families in such a medium.
Our analysis is based on the widely accepted model for the generation of spatial solitons in NLCs, which consists of scaled partial differential equations (PDEs) describing the scalar field of the director orientation angle θ and the paraxial wave equation for the envelope of the electric field. The equation for θ has the form
where τ is the director relaxation time, K is the Frank constant, 
is the transverse ...
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