LAUSR

Abstract In this paper, we discover several new soliton families in the PT symmetric optical lattices with the nonlocal competing cubic–quintic nonlinearity, and investigate their existence and stability ranges. We detailedly study the influence of the degree of nonlocality, the quintic nonlinearity and the PT symmetry on these solitons, and obtain the power surfaces of solitons under different degrees of nonlocality and PT symmetry. We demonstrate that solitons can be linearly stabilized in the first Bloch bandgap under the nonlocal focusing cubic and local defocusing quintic nonlinearity, while they can only exist in the semi-infinite Bloch bandgap under the nonlocal defocusing cubic and local focusing quintic nonlinearity.