Vortices and antivortices in antiferroelectric PbZrO3

Y Liu and HZ Zhang and K Shapovalov and RM Niu and JM Cairney and XZ Liao and K Roleder and A Majchrowski and J Arbiol and P Ghosez and G Catalan, NATURE MATERIALS, 24 (2025).

DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02245-3

Ferroelectric materials are characterized by a parallel arrangement of electric dipoles, but at the nanoscale they can present vortices and other non-trivial topological structures1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8-9 that combine small size and topological protection, rendering them functionally attractive10, 11, 12-13. The driving force for the appearance of vortices in ferroelectrics is the need to minimize the depolarizing fields at interfaces3, 4-5,14; by making the polarization rotate, depolarization fields vanish4,5,8,9. Antiferroelectrics, by contrast, are defined by an antiparallel arrangement of electric dipoles15. A priori, therefore, they lack the depolarization fields that drive the appearance of non-trivial topologies in ferroelectrics. At the atomic scale of the dipoles, however, we find that polar discontinuities can still happen, driving the appearance of topological singularities at ferroelastic domain walls.

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