Room-temperature dynamical bifurcation between coexisting polarization attractors in a bulk ferroelectric, enabling nanosecond energy release

Bulk ferroelectrics are commonly treated as strongly damped nonlinear dielectrics at room temperature, with inertial polarization effects expected primarily near structural instabilities or at ultrafast (THz) drive. Here we demonstrate experimentally that a commercial bulk ferroelectric capacitor operated far below its Curie temperature supports two distinct coexisting oscillatory regimes that act as dynamical attractors: a high-permittivity, strongly damped state at low excitation and a low-permittivity, high-quality-factor underdamped state at higher excitation. At intermediate excitation, the system exhibits a reproducible, history-dependent transition between regimes, consistent with separatrix-mediated switching in polarization phase space. An inertial Landau–Khalatnikov–Tani (LKT) model quantitatively reproduces the observed threshold, bistability window, and waveform evolution using an amplitude-dependent effective curvature of the Landau free energy. Beyond revealing an overlooked facet of room-temperature ferroelectric dynamics deep in the ordered phase, the transition enables rapid conversion of stored polarization free energy into electrical pulse energy, opening routes to low-loss voltage-tunable resonators and compact nanosecond pulsed-power drivers.