Imagine tiny whirlpools of electricity—miniature swirls inside materials no wider than a virus. That’s what scientists are studying now, and they’re called dipolar skyrmions. In a brief, exciting article titled “A tug-of-war recipe for nanoscale swirls”, MSE Professor Petro Maksymovych explains how a clever balance between two electric states creates these fascinating patterns (Maksymovych, 2025).
Ferroelectric materials have a built-in electrical polarization, like a tiny magnet but for electric charge. In antiferroelectric materials, those polarizations cancel out in alternating patterns. When materials combining both ferroelectric and antiferroelectric traits are squeezed together, they lock into a kind of electrical tug-of-war. This creates swirling textures in how the polarity lines up—imagine a dance where nearby arrows curve around each other instead of pointing one way.
These swirling patterns, called skyrmions, could be more than just pretty: they may help develop new, efficient devices that use electric fields to store or process information at incredibly small scales. Since the materials are already well-known and relatively easy to make—like common ceramics or thin films—this discovery could open a practical path to new tech in electronics.
In short, by harnessing a nanoscale tug-of-war between electric states, researchers have found a way to create swirling electrical textures—tiny but full of promise.
MSE Professor Petro Maksymovych published a perspective ” A tug-of-war recipe for nanoscale swirls. Nat. Mater. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02288-6, on a recent experimental finding of polar skyrmions in solid solutions of ferrroelectircs and antiferroelectrics by Zheng et al. []
Read the article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-025-02216-8
