Spiraling elliptic solitons in nonlocal nonlinear media without anisotropy

Abstract

The optical spatial solitons with ellipse-shaped spots have generally been considered to be a result of either linear or nonlinear anisotropy. In this paper, we introduce a class of spiraling elliptic solitons in the nonlocal nonlinear media without both linear and nonlinear anisotropy. The spiraling elliptic solitons carry the orbital angular momentum, which plays a key role in the formation of such solitons, and are stable for any degree of nonlocality except the local case when the response function of the material is Gaussian function. The formation of such solitons can be attributable to the effective anisotropic diffraction (linear anisotropy) resulting from the orbital angular momentum. Our variational analytical result is confirmed by direct numerical simulation of the nonlocal nonlinear Schrodinger equation.