Anomalous interaction of nonlocal solitons in media with competing nonlinearities

We theoretically investigate properties of individual bright spatial solitons and their interaction in nonlocal media with competing focusing and defocusing nonlinearities. We consider the general case with both nonlinear responses characterized by different strengths and degrees of nonlocality. We employ a variational approach to analytically describe soliton properties. In particular, we prove analytically that the interplay of focusing and defocusing nonlocal nonlinearities leads to attraction or repulsion of solitons depending on their separation distance. We then study the propagation and interaction of solitons using numerical simulations of the full model of beam propagation. The numerical simulations fully confirm our analytical results.