Bright optical beams in weakly nonlocal media: Variational analysis

We employ a variational technique to describe the propagation of a Gaussian beam in a nonlinear, weakly nonlocal medium and derive the conditions for breathing soliton formation in both one and two transverse dimensions. The reduced one-dimensional results agree quantitatively with known exact nonlocal soliton solutions. We subsequently formulate a simple procedure for estimating the strength of a weak nonlocality and verify its applicability by direct numerical simulations.