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Electric-field-induced multiferroic topological solitons

Nature Materials volume 23, pages 905–911 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Topologically protected spin whirls in ferromagnets are foreseen as the cart-horse of solitonic information technologies. Nevertheless, the future of skyrmionics may rely on antiferromagnets due to their immunity to dipolar fields, straight motion along the driving force and ultrafast dynamics. While complex topological objects were recently discovered in intrinsic antiferromagnets, mastering their nucleation, stabilization and manipulation with energy-efficient means remains an outstanding challenge. Designing topological polar states in magnetoelectric antiferromagnetic multiferroics would allow one to electrically write, detect and erase topological antiferromagnetic entities. Here we stabilize ferroelectric centre states using a radial electric field in multiferroic BiFeO3 thin films. We show that such polar textures contain flux closures of antiferromagnetic spin cycloids, with distinct antiferromagnetic entities at their cores depending on the electric field polarity. By tuning the epitaxial strain, quadrants of canted antiferromagnetic domains can also be electrically designed. These results open the path to reconfigurable topological states in multiferroic antiferromagnets.

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Fig. 1: Concept of multiferroic topological states.
Fig. 2: Polar maps extracted from PFM.
Fig. 3: Magnetoelectric coupling in ferroelectric centre states written on a (001)-oriented 33-nm-thick BiFeO3 thin film under –0.35% compressive strain.
Fig. 4: Magnetoelectric coupling in ferroelectric centre states written on a (001)-oriented 32-nm-thick BiFeO3 thin film grown under +0.50% tensile strain.

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Data availability

The data that support this work are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10875991 (ref. 36).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to N. Reyren for fruitful discussions. We are thankful for support from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) through projects TATOO (ANR-21-CE09-0033) and ESR/EquipEx+ programme e-DIAMANT (grant no. ANR-21-ESRE-0031) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements no. 964931 (TSAR) and no. 866267 (EXAFONIS). This work is supported by a public grant overseen by the ANR as part of the ‘Investissements d’Avenir’ programme (Labex NanoSaclay, reference ANR-10-LABX-0035). We also acknowledge the Sesame Ile de France IMAGeSPIN project (no. EX039175).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Albert Fert, CNRS, Thales, Université Paris-Saclay, Palaiseau, France

    Arthur Chaudron, Pauline Dufour, Amr Abdelsamie, Johanna Fischer, Sophie Collin, Karim Bouzehouane, Stéphane Fusil & Vincent Garcia

  2. Service de Physique de l’Etat Condensé (SPEC), French National Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Zixin Li, Jean-Yves Chauleau & Michel Viret

  3. Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France

    Aurore Finco, Amr Abdelsamie & Vincent Jacques

  4. Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Pavel Marton & Jirka Hlinka

  5. Institute of Mechatronics and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic

    Pavel Marton

  6. Laboratoire Structures, Propriétés et Modélisation des Solides (SPMS), Université Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupélec, CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Brahim Dkhil

  7. Université d’Evry, Université Paris-Saclay, Evry, France

    Stéphane Fusil

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  1. Arthur Chaudron
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Contributions

V.G. and S.F. designed the experiments. V.G. coordinated the work. P.D., A.A. and J.F. synthesized the thin films by pulsed laser deposition. S.F. and S.C. fabricated the devices using electron-beam lithography and sputtering deposition. A.C. switched and examined the polar textures using PFM. A.C. investigated the coupled spin textures using scanning NV magnetometry with the help of K.B.; Z.L., J.-Y.C. and M.V. performed the atomic spin simulations. A.F. and V.J. performed the stray field simulations. A.C., S.F. and V.G. wrote the core of the manuscript. All the authors discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript preparation.

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Correspondence to Stéphane Fusil or Vincent Garcia.

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Nature Materials thanks Masahito Mochizuki and Paolo Radaelli for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–12 and Note 1.

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Chaudron, A., Li, Z., Finco, A. et al. Electric-field-induced multiferroic topological solitons. Nat. Mater. 23, 905–911 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01890-4

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