Propagation of nonlocal optical solitons in lossy media with exponential-decay response

Propagation of optical solitons in lossy nonlocal media with exponential-decay response was investigated theoretically. The analytical solutions of nonlocal solitons and breathers are obtained by variational approach which is applied to a (1 + 1)D nonlocal nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The critical power of soliton and period of breathers are also obtained in the absence of the loss. When the loss is relatively small, the average beam width of breathers has a trend to expand during propagation. The analytical results are confirmed by numerical simulation.