Vol. 25, No. 9 | 1 May 2017 | OPTICS EXPRESS 10090 Self-structuring of stable dissipative breathing vortex solitons in a colloidal nanosuspension V. SKARKA,1,2,3 N.B.ALEKSIC´ ,1,2 W. KROLIKOWSKI,1,4 D. N. CHRISTODOULIDES,5 S.RAKOTOARIMALALA,3 B.N.ALEKSIC´ ,2,6 AND M.BELIC´ 1 1Texas A&M University at Qatar, P.O.Box 23874, Doha, Qatar 2Institute of Physics, University of Belgrade, P.O.Box 68, 11080 Belgrade, Serbia 3Laboratoire de Photonique d’Angers, EA 4464, University of Angers, 2 Boulevard Lavoisier, 49045 Angers Cedex 01, France 4Laser Physics Center, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia 5CREOL/College of Optics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA 6Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar, Doha, Qatar ∗[email protected] Abstract: The self-structuring of laser light in an artificial optical medium composed of a col- loidal suspension of nanoparticles is demonstrated using variational and numerical methods extended to dissipative systems. 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The medium is modified by the laser propagation, causing in turn the self-organized localization and structuring of the light itself. The main issue in nonlinear propagation of localized optical structures is their stability. Solitons are localized structures self-generated far from thermodynamic equilibrium [8]. In conservative systems, one- dimensional (1D) optical solitons, described by the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NSE), are self-trapped through the simultaneous balance of diffraction or dispersion by the self-focusing. In two dimensions, the catastrophic collapse of beams occurs that can be prevented by the presence of negative quintic nonlinearity [1, 9]. The generation of 2D optical solitons in a cubic-quintic Vol. 25, No. 9 | 1 May 2017 | OPTICS EXPRESS 10092 centrosymmetric medium has been recently demonstrated in an experiment [10]. However, in nature losses are always present, causing soliton annihilation in the absence of any gain. Complex