Nature Commun. 6, 8542 (2015)

The swirling spin textures known as skyrmions have generated great interest in the magnetics community. Stabilized by chiral interactions, these vortex-like excitations are topologically non-trivial, making them fairly robust against perturbations and useful for a range of technological applications. As ferroelectric compounds lack chiral interactions, one might expect that such textures cannot form in these materials, but this may not be the case.

Using first-principles-based methods, Yousra Nahas and colleagues have shown that a combination of geometric confinement and dipolar interactions can stabilize a skyrmionic configuration of polarization in ferroelectric nanocomposites. Although, at first glance, they seem similar to magnetic skyrmions, electrical skyrmions have a distinct topological charge density that has four-fold, rather than cylindrical symmetry. Perhaps more interestingly, they can be stabilized down to just a few nanometres, which will surely interest those working to develop skyrmion-based devices.

Unfortunately, such polarization textures do not seem to be stable at anywhere near room temperature. But the same was said of their magnetic counterparts, which recently achieved this feat. So although experimental confirmation is yet to materialize, one wonders how far extrinsic topological protection can be pushed in ferroelectrics.