Chaotic self-trapped optical beams in strongly nonlocal nonlinear media

The self-trapped optical beams possessing both chaotic and solitonlike properties, which are termed as chaoticons, were predicted by us [Sci. Rep. 7, 41438 (2017)] in the strongly nonlocal nonlinear media. We reveal that any random input beam, which has random initial transverse distribution and arbitrary input power, propagating in the strongly nonlocal nonlinear media with the exponential-decay response, will evolve into a chaoticon. The chaotic properties are signified by the positive Lyapunov exponents and spatial decoherence, while the solitonlike properties are demonstrated by the invariance of the beam width and the interaction of quasielastic collisions. Distinctively, the propagations of random inputs are always periodic in the strongly nonlocal media with the Gaussian response.