• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.167603
• Corpus ID: 24684188

Direct observation of the proliferation of ferroelectric loop domains and vortex-antivortex pairs.

@article{Chae2012DirectOO,
  title={Direct observation of the proliferation of ferroelectric loop domains and vortex-antivortex pairs.},
  author={Seung Chul Chae and Nara Lee and Y. Horibe and Makoto Tanimura and Shigeo Mori and Bin Gao and Scott V. Carr and S. -W. Cheong},
  journal={Physical review letters},
  year={2012},
  volume={108 16},
  pages={
          167603
        }
}

• S. Chae, N. Lee, +5 authors S. Cheong
• Published 23 March 2012
• Materials Science
• Physical review letters

We discovered stripe patterns of trimerization-ferroelectric domains in hexagonal REMnO(3) (RE=Ho,···,Lu) crystals (grown below ferroelectric transition temperatures (T(c)), reaching up to 1435 °C), in contrast with the vortex patterns in YMnO(3). These stripe patterns roughen with the appearance of numerous loop domains through thermal annealing just below T(c), but the stripe domain patterns turn to vortex-antivortex domain patterns through a freezing process when crystals cross T(c) even though the phase transition appears to not be Kosterlitz-Thouless-type. The experimental systematics are compared with the results of our six-state clock model simulation and also the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for trapped topological defects.