Frustrated ferroelectricity from interlocked topological defects

Ferroelectrics undergoing spontaneous symmetry breaking can manifest intricate domain patterns that allow the exploration of topological defects and their potential applications, such as domain-wall nanoelectronics. Engineering actual devices remains a challenge as domain patterns have complexity-driven properties whose origin and nature are still obscure. In relaxor ferroelectrics, dominant unconventional behavior, including thermal hysteresis and dielectric dispersion, is believed to result from frustrated dynamics of mesoscopic polar nanoregions (PNRs), where competing interaction terms among multiple components allow emergent phenomena as the result of minimizing conflicts. Existing theories propose analogies with Griffiths' phases or glassy states but fail to provide a full description, making relaxors a paradigm of hereto unexplained non-ergodic phenomenology. Here, we propose an explanatory mechanism based on the competition between intrinsic mesoscopic scales that naturally arise from discrete-inversion-symmetry-breaking and topological charge-screening flux-closure constraints. Computational analysis and experimental results on domain patterns in potassium-lithium-tantalate-niobate (KTN:Li) identify the key role of spontaneous polarization vortices, dependent on the ratio between collinear and non-collinear interactions. Our findings introduce a new perspective on frustration mechanisms, demonstrating how geometrical concepts are a fundamental ingredient in emergent ferroelectric behavior. They also shed light on the physics of ferroelectric topological defects, a possible route to noise-resistant memory and processing mechanisms.