Engineering soliton nonlinearities: from local to strongly nonlocal.

We put forward what we believe to be a novel strategy to achieve synthetic nonlinearities where local and nonlocal contributions compete on a similar footing, thus yielding intermediate tunable responses ranging from local to strongly nonlocal. The setting addressed is a semiconductor material with both Kerr and thermal nonlinearities illuminated by a pulse train with suitable pulse width and repetition rate.