Electric field control of magnetic structures, particularly topological
defects in magnetoelectric materials, draws a great attention in recent years,
which has led to experimental success in creation and manipulation by electric
field of single magnetic defects, such as domain walls and skyrmions. In this
work we explore a scenario of electric field creation of another type of
topological defects -- magnetic vortices and antivortices, which are
characteristic for materials with easy plane (XY) symmetry. Each magnetic
(anti)vortex in magnetoelectric materials (such as type-II multiferroics)
possesses a quantized magnetic and an electric charge, where the former is
responsible for interaction between vortices and the latter couples the
vortices to electric field. This property of magnetic vortices opens a peculiar
possibility of creation of magnetic vortex plasma by non-uniform electric
fields. We show that the electric field, created by a cantilever tip, produces
a "magnetic atom" with a localized spatially ordered spot of vortices
("nucleus" of the atom) surrounded by antivortices ("electronic shells"). We
analytically find the vortex density distribution profile and temperature
dependence of polarizability of this structure and confirm it numerically. We
show that electric polarizability of the "magnetic atom" depends on temperature
as $\alpha \sim 1/T^{1-\eta}$ ($\eta>0$), which is consistent with Euclidean
random matrix theory prediction.Comment: Accepted to Phys.Rev.B; 17 pages, 12 figure