Chiral polar textures probed with resonant X-ray diffraction

The formation of non-uniform polar vortices and skyrmions in complex oxide heterostructures opens up many intriguing areas of study, such as chirality, negative capacitance, collective dynamics, and topological phase transitions. Because these are inherently dependent on the 3-dimensional nature of such polar textures, a complete picture of the nanoscale structure is required. A lot can be gained from hard X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy studies, but resonant soft X-ray diffraction coupled with circular dichroism can give additional insights. Combining soft X-ray reciprocal space scans, circular dichroism, and scattering calculations, our picture of the 3-dimensional structures can be refined. I will discuss the non-uniform polar vortices and skyrmions that occur in (PbTiO3)/(SrTiO3) heterostructures, and how scattering studies at the Ti L-edges can be used to understand their 3-dimensional, chiral structures.