Abstract
We analyze the existence, stability, and mobility of gap solitons (GSs) in a periodic photonic structure built into a nonlocal self-defocusing medium. Counterintuitively, the GSs are supported even by a highly nonlocal nonlinearity, which makes the system quasilinear. Unlike local models, the variational approximation predicts the GSs in good agreement with numerical findings due to the suppression of undulating tails of the solitons. © 2010 The American Physical Society.