Propagation of light beams in turbid media such as underwater environments, fog, clouds, or biological tissues finds increasingly important applications in science and technology, including bio-imaging, underwater communication, and free-space communication technologies. While many of these applications traditionally relied on conventional, linearly polarized Gaussian beams, light possesses many degrees of freedom that are still largely unexplored, such as spin angular momentum (SAM) and orbital angular momentum (OAM). Here, we present nonlinear light–matter interactions of such complex light beams with “rotational” degrees of freedom in engineered nonlinear colloidal media. By making use of both variational and perturbative approach, we consider non-cylindrical optical vortices, elliptical optical vortices, and higher-order Bessel beams integrated in time (HOBBIT) to predict the dynamics and stability of the evolution of these beams. These results may find applications in many scenarios involving light transmission in strongly scattering environments.

光束在水下环境、雾、云或生物组织等混浊介质中的传播在科学和技术中的应用越来越重要，包括生物成像、水下通信和自由空间通信技术。虽然这些应用中有许多传统上依赖于传统的线性偏振高斯光束，但光具有许多仍未被探索的自由度，例如自旋角动量 (SAM) 和轨道角动量 (OAM)。在这里，我们展示了这种在工程非线性胶体介质中具有“旋转”自由度的复杂光束的非线性光-物质相互作用。通过使用变分和微扰方法，我们考虑非圆柱形光学涡旋、椭圆形光学涡旋、和高阶贝塞尔光束在时间上积分 (HOBBIT)，以预测这些光束演化的动力学和稳定性。这些结果可能会在涉及强散射环境中的光传输的许多场景中找到应用。