Abstract
Relaxor ferroelectrics underpin high-performance actuators and sensors, yet the nature of polar heterogeneities driving their broadband dielectric response remains debated. Using a unified, multimodal structural refinement framework— simultaneously fitting complementary X-ray and neutron total scattering, X-ray absorption spectra, and diffuse scattering—we reconstruct 3D mesoscale polarization maps in the classic relaxor system PbMg1/3Nb2/3O3–PbTiO3. We uncover self-organized swirling polarization textures with half-skyrmion (meron) vortices, challenging models of independent polar nanoregions. These textures, characterized by smooth changes in the polarization direction, originate from overlapping volumes in which the projections of locally correlated polarization vectors onto each volume’s long axis share the same sign. Vortex cores correlate strongly with local charge and strain gradients imposed by compositional heterogeneities. In this work, our results suggest that chemical disorder, acting via depolarizing and strain fields, stabilizes topological vortex textures of the polarization field, offering a route for engineering new dielectric and ferroelectric functionalities.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 7531 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2025 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
Experiments at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon Source (RB 1920053) were supported by beamtime allocation from the UK Science and Technology Facility Council. We thank Diamond Light Source for access to beamline I15-1 (proposal CY27040) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility for the provision of beam time on ID28. Portions of this research were carried out at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NIST beamline 6-BM) and at the Spallation Neutron Source, operated for the DOE Office of Science by Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory under Contracts No. DE-AC02-98CG10886 and DE-SC0012704, respectively. The beamtime at SNS was allocated to CORELLI on proposal number IPTS-32622.1. S.G. and I.L. acknowledge the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation for their financial support (Award No. 2018161). S.G. was also supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Awards 1561/18, 1365/23). B.-X.W. and Z.-G.Y. acknowledge the support from the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (DG, RGPIN-2023-04416) and the U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014-21-1-2085). This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( https://www.energy.gov/doe-public-access-plan ).