We address the stabilization of dipole solitons in nonlocal nonlinear
materials by two different approaches. First, we study the properties of such
solitons in thermal nonlinear media, where the refractive index landscapes
induced by laser beams strongly depend on the boundary conditions and on the
sample geometry. We show how the sample geometry impacts the stability of
higher-order solitons in thermal nonlinear media and reveal that dipole
solitons can be made dynami-cally stable in rectangular geometries in contrast
to their counterparts in thermal samples with square cross-section. Second, we
discuss the impact of the saturation of the nonlocal nonlinear response on the
properties of multipole solitons. We find that the saturable response also
stabi-lizes dipole solitons even in symmetric geometries, provided that the
input power exceeds a criti-cal value.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.