摘要

We report an extension of variational method to study the elliptic Gaussian beam propagation in a nonlinear medium with nonlinear refraction as well as nonlinear absorption. The results obtained by this method agree quantitatively with numerical solutions. Meanwhile, results also show that the variational method takes much less time than numerical simulations using the finite difference method for analysis of elliptic Gaussian beam propagation in a thick medium with nonlinear refraction and nonlinear absorption. The validity of the variational method is checked to be very good.