Abstract
Ferroelectric vortex in multiferroic materials has been considered as a promising alternative to current memory cells for the merit of high storage density. However, the formation of regular natural ferroelectric vortex is difficult, restricting the achievement of vortex memory device. Here, we demonstrated the creation of ferroelectric vortex-antivortex pairs in BiFeO3 thin films by using local electric field. The evolution of the polar vortex structure is studied by piezoresponse force microscopy at nanoscale. The results reveal that the patterns and stability of vortex structures are sensitive to the poling position. Consecutive writing and erasing processes cause no influence on the original domain configuration. The Z4 proper coloring vortex-antivortex network is then analyzed by graph theory, which verifies the rationality of artificial vortex-antivortex pairs. This study paves a foundation for artificial regulation of vortex, which provides a possible pathway for the design and realization of non-volatile vortex memory devices and logical devices.
Highlights
Topological vortices are ubiquitous in condensed matter physics and are highly involved in the correlated properties of superconductor, superfluid, ferroelectric material, and ferrimagnet.[1,2,3] The structures derived from the interaction among vortices are associated with various fascinating phenomena
We develop a method to create vortexantivortex pairs in BFO thin films by scanning probe microscopy (SPM) with voltage pulse
The domain structure after 1 h is shown in Fig. 2a, where the yellow dashed square box represents the region influenced by tip field
Summary
Topological vortices are ubiquitous in condensed matter physics and are highly involved in the correlated properties of superconductor, superfluid, ferroelectric material, and ferrimagnet.[1,2,3] The structures derived from the interaction among vortices are associated with various fascinating phenomena. The study of topological defects is crucial to ferroic materials, such as the conductivity of domain walls,[6,7,8] and the electric field manipulating and imprinting of ferroelectric domains into ferromagnets.[9, 10] In recent years, a wide spectrum of ferroelectric vortices have been investigated in the forms of nanostructure, epitaxial thin film, oxide superlattice and single crystal, in which the vortices are widespread in ferroelectric systems with perovskite structure.[11,12,13,14,15,16,17] Balke et al
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