We present an overview of recent advances in the understanding of optical beams in nonlinear media with a spatially nonlocal nonlinear response. We discuss the impact of nonlocality on the modulational instability of plane waves, the collapse of finite-size beams, and the formation and interaction of spatial solitons.

We investigate the properties of localized waves in cubic nonlinear materials with a symmetric nonlocal nonlinear response of arbitrary shape and degree of nonlocality, described by a general nonlocal nonlinear Schrödinger type equation. We prove rigorously by bounding the Hamiltonian that nonlocality of the nonlinearity prevents collapse in, e.g., Bose-Einstein condensates and optical Kerr media in all physical dimensions. The nonlocal nonlinear response must be symmetric and have a positive definite Fourier spectrum, but can otherwise be of completely arbitrary shape and degree of nonlocality. We use variational techniques to find the soliton solutions and illustrate the stabilizing effect of nonlocality.

We study modulational instability ͑MI͒ of plane waves in nonlocal nonlinear Kerr media. For a focusing nonlinearity we show that, although the nonlocality tends to suppress MI, it can never remove it completely, irrespective of the particular profile of the nonlocal response function. For a defocusing nonlinearity the stability properties depend sensitively on the response function profile: for a smooth profile ͑e.g., a Gaussian͒ plane waves are always stable, but MI may occur for a rectangular response. We also find that the reduced model for a weak nonlocality predicts MI in defocusing media for arbitrary response profiles, as long as the intensity exceeds a certain critical value. However, it appears that this regime of MI is beyond the validity of the reduced model, if it is to represent the weakly nonlocal limit of a general nonlocal nonlinearity, as in optics and the theory of Bose-Einstein condensates.

We study experimentally nonlinear localization effects in optically induced gratings created by interfering plane waves in a photorefractive crystal. We demonstrate the generation of spatial bright solitons similar to those observed in arrays of coupled optical waveguides. We also create pairs of out-of-phase solitons, which resemble twisted localized states in nonlinear lattices.

We investigate the propagation of one-dimensional bright and dark spatial solitons in a nonlocal Kerr-like media, in which the nonlocality is of general form. We find an exact analytical solution to the nonlinear propagation equation in the case of weak nonlocality. We study the properties of these solitons and show their stability.