08,12,2026 9 views
【instrumentOnline R&D News】Recently, Professor Zhang Guoquan's team from the School of Physical Sciences at Nankai University, together with Professor Eugenio DelRe from the University of Rome in Italy, Professor Beatriz Noheda from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and Professor Aharon J. Agranat's team from the Hebrew University of Israel, discovered a three-dimensional ferroelectric woven network formed by spontaneous symmetry breaking in potassium lithium tantalum niobate (KTN: Li) ferroelectric crystals and achieved local optical control. This study reveals a new mechanism for the formation of topological structures in solid-state ferroelectric crystals, providing a new material system for the development of highly robust photon storage, information processing, and neural morphology computing with global topological protection. The related achievements were published in the international academic journal "Light: Science&Applications" under the title "Spontaneous Formation and Optical Manipulation of a Woven Domain Fabric in a Ferroelectric Crystal". Nankai University is the first unit to complete the paper, and the first author of the paper is Xin Feifei, a teacher from the School of Physical Sciences at Nankai University.
Ferroelectric materials encode information through the spatial distribution of spontaneous polarization, which is an important foundation for efficient electronic and photonic ferroelectric storage devices. Its polarization state can be driven by a light field to achieve reading, writing, and erasing, giving the storage process non-contact and reconfigurable optical manipulation capabilities. In recent years, topological polarization structures such as ferroelectric vortices and skyrmions have received widespread attention due to their topological protection. However, the superlattice formed by such structures is still essentially composed of local topological units, and its topological protection is limited to each local unit. In contrast, complex systems such as DNA double helices and neural fiber networks in nature form networks that cover the entire system through continuous interweaving. Their stability comes from overall topological connectivity rather than individual topological units, thus possessing high stability, fault tolerance, and structural plasticity. By combining this global topology protection mechanism with the optical controllability of ferroelectric materials, it is expected to construct a biomimetic photon information storage and processing platform that combines high stability and reconfigurability. However, such three-dimensional braided topological structures formed by spontaneous symmetry breaking have not been observed in solid-state ferroelectric crystals before.
The research team found that during the ferroelectric phase transition of KTN crystals, when the temperature drops to about 2 ℃ below the Curie temperature (19 ℃), the regularly arranged ferroelectric domains in the superlattice will spontaneously evolve into a three-dimensional ferroelectric woven network. Unlike local topological structures such as ferroelectric vortices and skyrmions, this woven network is composed of continuous ferroelectric domains interwoven with each other and runs through the entire system, possessing global topological protection properties. Further research has found that the interweaving relationship of woven networks at different intersection nodes is irregular and depends on the formation history of the network, thereby endowing it with information encoding ability. Based on this characteristic, the research team has achieved local optical control of three-dimensional ferroelectric braided networks, selectively reconstructing the braided structure using a focused optical field, and realizing optical writing, optical erasing, and optical reconstruction of complex topological states. The global topology protection mechanism endows the structure with good stability, while optical control enables flexible manipulation of different topology states, providing a new approach for building highly robust and reconfigurable photon information storage and processing platforms.
The above research results have expanded the application boundaries of ferroelectric topological structures in the fields of information storage and processing, achieved the combination of topological stability and optical reconfigurability, provided a new material system for the development of biomimetic photon information storage platforms with high stability and reconfigurability, and provided new possibilities for the future development of neural morphology computing and low-energy information processing technologies. This research has received funding from national key research and development programs, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and other projects.
