Ferroelectric materials are characterized by a parallel arrangement of electric dipoles, but at the nanoscale they can present vortices and other non-trivial topological structures1–9 that combine small size and topological protection, rendering them functionally attractive10–13. The driving force for the appearance of vortices in ferroelectrics is the need to minimize the depolarizing fields at interfaces3–5,14; by making the polarization rotate, depolarization fields vanish4,5,8,9. Antiferroelectrics, by contrast, are defined by an antiparallel arrangement of electric dipoles15. A priori, therefore, they lack the depolarization fields that drive the appearance of non-trivial topologies in ferroelectrics. At the atomic scale of the dipoles, however, we find that polar discontinuities can still happen, driving the appearance of topological singularities at ferroelastic domain walls.
