Non Local Solitons and Filamentation in Soft Matter

Optical spatial solitons are known to be unconditionally stable in non local media. We considered their features, even beyond paraxial regime; thus unveiling the existence of ultra-thin self-trapped beam in soft materials. Soft matter is also characterized by disorder. We studied the effect of spatial inhomogeneity in the propagation of multiple filaments generated by non local modulational instability. The disorder was modeled through a stochastic non local nonlinear Schroumldinger equation. It turns out that the number and the distribution of generated light filaments in 2+1D is strongly affected by the fractal dimension D, and a statistical description can be developed by introducing the light structure factor S_light(q) of a "filamented" beam.