The devil’s staircase, describing step-like function for two competing frequencies, is well known over a wide range of dynamic systems including Huyghens’ clocks, Josephson junction, and chemical reaction. In condensed matter physics, the devil’s staircase has been observed in spatially modulated structures, such as magnetic ordering. It draws widespread attentions because it plays a crucial role in the fascinating phenomena including phase-locking behaviors, commensurate-incommensurate phase transition, and spin-valve effect. Here, we report the observation of polymorphic phase transitions consisting of several steps in PbZrO 3 -based system—namely, electric devil’s staircase—originated from competing ferroelectric and antiferroelectric interactions. We fully characterize a specific electric dipole configuration by decomposing this competitive interaction in terms of basic structure and modulation function. Of particular interest is that the occurrence of many degenerate electric dipole configurations in devil’s staircase enables superior energy storage performance. These observations are of great significance for exploring more substantive magnetic-electric correspondence and engineering practical high-power antiferroelectric capacitors.

The energy storage performance of antiferroelectric ceramic capacitors has always gain much attention. Hysteresis, transition field, and polarization intensity are crucial factors influencing energy storage performance. A-site doped small radius ions have been shown in numerous investigations to enhance the switching field, minimize hysteresis, but decrease maximum polarization intensity. How to maintain the high polarization while optimizing other parameters is a great challenge, and this problem has received scant attention in the research literature to date. In this work, Pb 1-x Sr x (Zr 0.54 Sn 0.46 ) 0.975 Nb 0.02 O 3 (x = 0, 0.02, 0.06, 0.08, 0.1, 0.12, 0.14, 0.16, 0.20) antiferroelectric ceramics show high polarization stability. When the Sr 2+ content is within 12 mol%, the saturation polarization intensity always remains at a large value (> 44μC/cm 2 ), and the rate of change is as low as 6%. Pb 0.92 Sr 0.08 (Zr 0.54 Sn 0.46 ) 0.975 Nb 0.02 O 3 also displays great polarization temperature stability with a minimal change rate of 8.5% in a wide temperature range from -55 to 85 • C. Additionally, this ceramic also has a superior energy storage performance that the recoverable energy density and energy storage efficiency and 8.95 J/cm 3 and 80.4%, respectively. This work paves the way for practical simultaneous polarization and other parameter optimization.