arXiv AI By Yu Liu, Boris Slautin, Ching-Che Lin, Jaegyu Kim, Lane W. Martin, Sergei V. Kalinin

Human-agent discovery of reconfigurable in-plane ferroelectric superdomain control

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The paper introduces the Scanning Probe Agentic Research Cycle (SPARC), a framework where a coding agent and a human operator collaboratively control a microscope, sharing data and persistent memory files. SPARC was applied to reconfigure the in‑plane superdomain direction of a (111)-oriented PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 film, demonstrating that spatial polarity alternation governs directional selection and enabling the printing of the letters UTK into the superdomain orientation. The study also identifies practical requirements for agentic experimentation, such as physical verification of instrument execution and validation of new observables.

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