Workshop 2025: Highway to electrifying skyrmions

Session Information

Location: Lecture room Schay
Day: Thursday, 15 May
Time: 14:30 - 15:00
Chairperson: Susmit Kumar

Presentation Details

Presentation Type: Oral presentation
Title: Highway to electrifying skyrmions
Abstract: Researchers have long sought to determine whether ferroelectric materials, known for their spontaneous and switchable electric polarization, can exhibit topological textures similar to magnetic skyrmions and chiral bubbles. The experimental discoveries of dipole vortices in PbTiO3/SrTiO3 superlattices [1,2], alongside earlier theoretical predictions of Bloch-like structures in ferroelectric domain walls [3], have catalyzed the search for electric Skyrmions.
In this work, I demonstrate that a simple multidomain configuration in PbTiO3 or BaTiO3 – specifically, a columnar nanodomain with polarization opposite to that of its surrounding matrix – is sufficient to stabilize, using atomistic simulations, a variety of dipole textures with the topology of a skyrmion [4] or antiskyrmion [5]. The combination of theoretical and experimental efforts has led to the first observation of electric skyrmions in PbTiO3/SrTiO3 superlattices [6] at room temperature. These electric skyrmions were observed in the PbTiO3 ferroelectric layers, which are confined by paraelectric SrTiO3 layers.


[1] Yadav, A.K., Nelson, C.T. et al., Observation of polar vortices in oxide superlattices. Nature 530, 198-201 (2016).
[2] Damodaran, A. R. et al., Phase coexistence and electric-field control of toroidal order in oxide superlattices. Nature Materials 16, 1003 (2017).
[3] Wojdel, J. C. et al., Ferroelectric Transitions at Ferroelectric Domain Walls Found from First Principles. Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 247603 (2014).
[4] M.A.P. Gonçalves et al., Theoretical guidelines to create and tune electric skyrmion bubbles. Science Advances 5, no. 2, eaau7023 (2019).
[5] M. A. P. Gonçalves, et al, Antiskyrmions in Ferroelectric Barium Titanate. Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 066802 (2024)
[6] S. Das et al., Observation of room temperature polar skyrmions. Nature 568, 368-372 (2019).

Presenter

Dr Mauro António Pereira Gonçalves
Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences | Czech Republic

Authors

1. Pereira Gonçalves, Mauro António | Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences Na Slovance 1999/2, 182 00 Prague 8