  Ferroelectrics undergoing spontaneous symmetry breaking can manifest
intricate domain patterns that allow the exploration of topological defects and
their potential applications, such as domain-wall nanoelectronics. Engineering
actual devices remains a challenge as domain patterns have complexity-driven
properties whose origin and nature are still obscure. In relaxor
ferroelectrics, dominant unconventional behavior, including thermal hysteresis
and dielectric dispersion, is believed to result from frustrated dynamics of
mesoscopic polar nanoregions (PNRs), where competing interaction terms among
multiple components allow emergent phenomena as the result of minimizing
conflicts. Existing theories propose analogies with Griffiths' phases or glassy
states but fail to provide a full description, making relaxors a paradigm of
hereto unexplained non-ergodic phenomenology. Here, we propose an explanatory
mechanism based on the competition between intrinsic mesoscopic scales that
naturally arise from discrete-inversion-symmetry-breaking and topological
charge-screening flux-closure constraints. Computational analysis and
experimental results on domain patterns in potassium-lithium-tantalate-niobate
(KTN:Li) identify the key role of spontaneous polarization vortices, dependent
on the ratio between collinear and non-collinear interactions. Our findings
introduce a new perspective on frustration mechanisms, demonstrating how
geometrical concepts are a fundamental ingredient in emergent ferroelectric
behavior. They also shed light on the physics of ferroelectric topological
defects, a possible route to noise-resistant memory and processing mechanisms.
