Pulse-Driven Reconfiguration of Fractional Polar Topology in Zr-Substituted Barium Titanate

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Autore principale: Mayer, Florian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Mayer, Florian
author_facet Mayer, Florian
contents Polar topological textures in ferroelectrics can host internal structure beyond a single integer topological charge. Here, effective-Hamiltonian molecular-dynamics simulations are used to examine whether such internal fractional topology can be reconfigured by local electric excitation in ordered 12.5% Zr-substituted barium titanate. Chemical doubling along the polar axis stabilizes a coupled nanodomain texture consisting of alternating Q = -2 antiskyrmionic and Q = +4 skyrmionic slices, in which the local topological charge fragments into six -1/3 and six +2/3 localized contributions, denoted here as topological quarks, separated by Bloch-point-like singular conversion regions. Picosecond local electric-field pulses applied to selected vortex-core columns drive reconfiguration of the internal dipolar texture of a 2.6 nm nanodomain. Under a binary pulse-mask protocol addressing the six vortex cores, all 64 masks lead, within the chosen low-temperature simulation protocol, to distinct relaxed metastable configurations. The switching calculations are performed in a cryogenic regime, and the programmed states remain stable over at least 1 ns of field-free evolution on the simulation timescale. The resulting configurations are distinguishable both by sector-resolved topological fingerprints and by their real-space polarization fields. These results provide a computational proof of concept that fractional polar topology in a ferroelectric nanodomain can be locally reconfigured by ultrafast electric excitation and used as a multistate configurational degree of freedom in an idealized low-temperature setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_21368
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pulse-Driven Reconfiguration of Fractional Polar Topology in Zr-Substituted Barium Titanate
Mayer, Florian
Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Polar topological textures in ferroelectrics can host internal structure beyond a single integer topological charge. Here, effective-Hamiltonian molecular-dynamics simulations are used to examine whether such internal fractional topology can be reconfigured by local electric excitation in ordered 12.5% Zr-substituted barium titanate. Chemical doubling along the polar axis stabilizes a coupled nanodomain texture consisting of alternating Q = -2 antiskyrmionic and Q = +4 skyrmionic slices, in which the local topological charge fragments into six -1/3 and six +2/3 localized contributions, denoted here as topological quarks, separated by Bloch-point-like singular conversion regions. Picosecond local electric-field pulses applied to selected vortex-core columns drive reconfiguration of the internal dipolar texture of a 2.6 nm nanodomain. Under a binary pulse-mask protocol addressing the six vortex cores, all 64 masks lead, within the chosen low-temperature simulation protocol, to distinct relaxed metastable configurations. The switching calculations are performed in a cryogenic regime, and the programmed states remain stable over at least 1 ns of field-free evolution on the simulation timescale. The resulting configurations are distinguishable both by sector-resolved topological fingerprints and by their real-space polarization fields. These results provide a computational proof of concept that fractional polar topology in a ferroelectric nanodomain can be locally reconfigured by ultrafast electric excitation and used as a multistate configurational degree of freedom in an idealized low-temperature setting.
title Pulse-Driven Reconfiguration of Fractional Polar Topology in Zr-Substituted Barium Titanate
topic Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21368