Multihump thermo-reorientational solitary waves in nematic liquid crystals: Modulation theory solutions

The propagation of light-induced thermo-reorientational solitary waves in nematic liquid crystals is studied using numerical solutions of the full governing equations and variational approximations. These thermoreorientational solitary waves form as the nonlocal refractive index response to extraordinarily polarized light beams is both self-focusing via the induced rotation of the constituent molecules and self-defocusing owing to the temperature increase through optical absorption. These competing nonlinearities can lead to the formation of one- and two-dimensional multihumped solitary and ring-shaped waves at high enough optical powers with a volcano profile on the plane transverse to propagation. The variational solutions for these self-localized structured beams are in remarkably good agreement with full numerical solutions of the governing equations.