Dynamics of necklace beams in nonlinear colloidal suspensions

Recently, we have predicted that the modulation instability of optical vortex solitons propagating in nonlinear colloidal suspensions with exponential saturable nonlinearity leads to formation of necklace beams (NBs). Here, we investigate the dynamics of NB formation and propagation, and demonstrate a variety of optical beam structures emerging upon vortex beam propagation in engineered nonlinear colloidal medium. In particular, we show that the distance at which the NB is formed depends on the input power of the vortex beam. Moreover, we show that the NB trajectories are not necessarily tangent to the initial vortex ring, and that their velocities have components stemming both from the beam diffraction and from the beam orbital angular momentum. We also demonstrate the generation of elliptical rotating solitons and analyze the influence of losses on their propagation. Finally, we investigate the conservation of the orbital angular momentum in necklace and elliptical rotating beams. Our studies, performed in ideal lossless media and in realistic colloidal suspensions with losses, provide a detailed description of NB dynamics, and may be useful in analysis of light propagation in highly scattering colloids and biological samples.