Electric-Field Control of Chirality of vortices in PbTiO₃/SrTiO₃superlattices

Dipolar textures in ferroelectrics, such as polar vortices and skyrmions have been extensively studied and several interesting physical phenomena have been discovered. Perhaps the most exotic and unexpected among them is the emergence of chirality that arise from a sequence of achiral materials [1]. Strain engineering or electric-field control of such chiral response would be of fundamental and technological interest. Extensive theoretical work has been devoted to accomplish this objective [2-4] but has remained elusive form the experimental point of view. A recent work [5] addresses this issue, however, the presence of random fields during the switching precludes a deterministic control of the chirality. Using second-principles methods as implemented in the SCALE-UP code [6] we proved deterministic and reversible control of chirality over mesoscale regions by means of an homogeneous electric field [7].

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