Solitons phenomena in highly nonlocal media: From soliton wiring and surface solitons to random-phase solitons and controlling solitons from afar

Solitons are self-localized wave-packets arising from a robust balance between dispersion and nonlinearity. They are a universal phenomenon, displaying properties typically associated with particles. Until recently, the vast majority of soliton-research was focused on solitons in nonlinear media with a local response. As such, the interactions between solitons were limited to "nearest neighbors" at close proximity. This feature poses an upper limit to the complexity of a system constructed from solitons as building blocks, for example, a soliton-based computing scheme. In addition, for scalar (single-field) solitons, in the integrable self-focusing Kerr system as well as in all saturable nonlinearities, only the simplest solitons are stable: those possessing a bell-shape structure.