Gap solitons in optical lattices embedded into nonlocal media

Abstract

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.