Abstract
We find self-accelerating beams in highly nonlocal nonlinear optical media, and show that their propagation dynamics is strongly affected by boundary conditions. Specifically for the thermal optical nonlinearity, the boundary conditions have a strong impact on the beam trajectory: they can increase the acceleration during propagation, or even cause beam bending in a direction opposite to the initial trajectory. Under strong self-focusing, the accelerating beam decomposes into a localized self-trapped beam propagating on an oscillatory trajectory and a second beam which accelerates in a different direction. We augment this study by investigating the effects caused by a finite aperture and by a nonlinear range of a finite extent.
Highlights
The past few years have witnessed considerable research on self-accelerating beams and optical pulses
Many soliton-supporting nonlinear systems display a highly nonlocal response, for example thermal glasses [14,15], liquid crystals [16,17], charge carriers in semiconductor amplifiers [18] and more. This raises the intriguing question: can selfaccelerating solitons exist in nonlocal nonlinear media? This question becomes even more interesting in long-range nonlocal nonlinear media, where the response is strongly affected by boundary conditions, such that even highly localized soliton beams can be controlled from afar [15,19,20]
We demonstrated the complex dynamic of an accelerating beam propagating under non-accelerating boundary conditions that exert forces on the beam
Summary
The past few years have witnessed considerable research on self-accelerating beams and optical pulses. This question becomes even more interesting in long-range nonlocal nonlinear media, where the response is strongly affected by boundary conditions, such that even highly localized soliton beams can be controlled from afar [15,19,20]. This issue is especially interesting for accelerating beams, because all accelerating wavepackets found far, in linear and nonlinear media, albeit being localized functions, they all have an infinite oscillating tail. As x → −a , the self-trapped solution differs from the Airy function, mainly due to the boundary conditions
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