Soliton transverse instabilities in nonlocal nonlinear media

We analyze the transverse instabilities of spatial bright solitons in nonlocal nonlinear media, both analytically and numerically. We demonstrate that the nonlocal nonlinear response leads to a dramatic suppression of the transverse instability of the soliton stripes, and we derive the asymptotic expressions for the instability growth rate in both short- and long-wave approximations.