Pulse-Driven Reconfiguration of Fractional Polar Topology in Zr-Substituted Barium Titanate
Abstract
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.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{mayer2026pulsedriven,
title = {{Pulse-Driven Reconfiguration of Fractional Polar Topology in Zr-Substituted Barium Titanate}},
author = {Florian Mayer},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.21368},
eprint = {2605.21368},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21368},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Pulse-Driven Reconfiguration of Fractional Polar Topology in Zr-Substituted Barium Titanate
AU - Florian Mayer
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.21368
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21368
AB - 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.
ER -