Route to Nonlocality and Observation of Accessible Solitons

We develop a general theory of spatial solitons in a liquid crystalline medium exhibiting a nonlinearity with an arbitrary degree of effective nonlocality. The model accounts the observability of accessible solitons and establishes an important link with parametric solitons.

Figure 1

Planarly aligned nematic liquid crystal cell for the observation of spatial solitons. $\widehat{\theta }(X)$ is the low-frequency voltage-induced angle displacement. ${\theta }_0=\widehat{\theta }(0)$ and $\Psi$ is the perturbation due to the propagating optical field.

Figure 2

Ratio $\rho$ between the waists of the angle $\psi$ and the field $a$ from Eq. (8). The insets show two different profiles (dashed line: $\psi$; solid line: $a$) for values of $\alpha$ addressing the two limits in the family of solitary waves.