Manifestations of topological defects in microwave spectra of ferroelectric and antiferroelectric materials

Advisor: Jiri Hlinka (FZU CAS)

Funding: base scholarship

Website: http://palata.fzu.cz/diel/

Contact: hlinka@fzu.cz

Since long time, domain walls were considered as almost ideal nanoscale soliton objects, representing the basic topological defects of order parameters in various ferroic materials. Numerous experimental and theoretical works had interpreted microwave relaxations in ferroelectric materials in terms of the ferroelectric domain walls. Only recently, however, atomistic models became capable to verify such hypotheses.

The goal of the PhD thesis is to systematically measure and analyze spectra of selected model ferroelectrics anti-ferroelectrics in order to detect manifestations of particular types of topological defects, in particular different types of domain walls, but also dislocations or the skyrmion fibre defects.

In particular, we seek a PhD student interested to contribute to the team effort aimed to bring to the fore a completely new family of materials and novel phenomena related to the skyrmion and vortex textures[1].

Literature:

[1] K. C. Erb and J. Hlinka, PHYSICAL REVIEW B 102, 024110 (2020).