Spiraling elliptic solitons in lossy nonlocal nonlinear media

We address the propagation dynamics of the spiraling elliptic beams in nonlocal non-linear media with losses based on the variational approach. It is found that the spiraling elliptic beams exhibit complicated behaviors, which result from the combined effects of the losses and orbital angular momentum (OAM). The OAM brings in an effective anisotropic diffraction and rotation for the spiraling elliptic beams. However, due to the losses, the rotation of the spiraling beams slows down. Besides, the ellipticity of the spiraling elliptic beams is greatly affected by the lossesand the OAM. When the OAM is not equal to its critical value, a periodic oscillation of the ellipticity is found in the presence of losses. However, when the OAM is equal to the critical one, the ellipticity of the spiraling elliptic beam remains unchanged during propagation regardless of the loss factor. The comparisons between our approximate analytic solutions and numerical simulations confirm our results. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America.