Unusual self-spreading or self-compression of the cubic-quintic NLSE solitons owing to amplification or absorption

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It is usually believed that solitons always expand due to absorption, and vice versa, they can be significantly compressed due to amplification. Contrary to this usual opinion, we demonstrate that the higher-order nonlinearity opens the possibility to observe unusual and contrasting effects, namely, the soliton self-spreading effect arising due to the soliton amplification and vise versa, the soliton self-compression effect appearing in the absorption regime of the soliton propagation. The detailed contrasting scenarios of the soliton self-spreading or self-compression owing to amplification or absorption are considered in the framework of the simplest cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation model.