Visual Analysis of Polarization Domains in Barium Titanate during Phase Transitions

Abstract

In recent years, the characteristics of ferroelectric barium titanate (BaTiO3) have been studied extensively in materials science. Barium titanate has been widely used for building transducers, capacitors and, as of late, for memory devices. In this context, a precise understanding of the formation of polarization domains during phase transitions within the material is especially important. Therefore, we propose an application that uses a combination of proven visualization techniques in order to aid physicists in the visual analysis of molecular dynamic simulations of BaTiO3. A set of linked 2D and 3D views conveys an overview of the evolution of dipole moments over time by visualizing single time steps as well as combining multiple time steps in one single static image using flow radar glyphs. In addition, our system semi-automatically detects polarization domains, whose spatial relation can be interactively analyzed at different levels of detail on commodity hardware. The evolution of selected polarization domains over their lifetime can be observed by a combination of animated spatial and quantitative views.