Multi-hump optical solitons in a saturable medium

We investigate multi-hump spatial solitary waves and multi-soliton patterns generated by an incoherent interaction of two optical beams in a medium wi th saturable (e.g. photorefractive) nonlinearity. Applying a bifurcation an alysis and numerical relaxation technique, we reveal different scenarios of creating the multi-hump solitons and find the families of solitary waves c omposed of two mutually coupled components. We analyse the stability of the se solitons to propagation and find that the evolution of a soliton is gove rned by its modal structure.