Propagation properties of spatial optical solitons in different nonlocal nonlinear media with arbitrary degrees of nonlocality

We address the physical features exhibited by spatial optical solitons propagating in nonlocal Kerr-type media with Gaussian-shaped response and exponential-decay response, respectively. An iteration algorithm based on the split-step Fourier method is developed to obtain the numerical solutions of the solitons for the nonlocal nonlinear Schrödinger equation with arbitrary degrees of nonlocality. Our numerical results show that the soliton properties in the normalized system are different with the change of the degree of nonlocality and with the different responses. The profiles undergo a gradual and continuous transition from a Gaussian-shaped function in the strongly nonlocal case to a hyperbolic secant function in the local case for the Gaussian-shaped response, but for the exponential-decay response, the soliton profile is not Gaussian-shaped even in the strongly nonlocal cases. For the same response function, the stronger the nonlocality is, the higher the critical powers for solitons are and the larger of the phase shifts of the solitons. For the same degrees of nonlocality, when the degrees of nonlocality is larger enough, both the critical power and the phase shift for the Gaussian-shaped response are larger than that for the exponential-decay response.