2012 IEEE Visualization Contest Winner: Visualizing Polarization Domains in Barium Titanate

Abstract

T he 2012 IEEE Visualization Contest's topic was the detection of phase transitions in ferroelectric materials-in particular, barium titanate (BaTiO3). (For more on the contest, see the sidebar.) Ferroelectric materials' electric properties make them suitable for a variety of applications. One major application is high-permittivity capacitors. Several ferroelectric materials are promising alternatives for volatile-and nonvolatile-memory devices.A dielectric material is ferroelectric if it exhibits spontaneous polarization that can be reversed by applying an external electric field. Dielectric materials that show nonlinear polarization are called paraelectrics. In all ferroelectrics, a phase transition from a paraelectric to ferroelectric state occurs when the material's temperature decreases. 1 The visualization of phase transitions, or polarization domains in general, is a novel research field. Sebastian Grottel and his colleagues recently showed how a combination of glyph-based visualizations and isosurfaces derived from the anisotropy can reveal metal oxides' electrostatic properties. 2 We used the particle data from the contest to derive a vector field indicating the material's polarization. By combining several visualization methods, we qualitatively estimated the polarization domains' size and spatial distribution. We also investigated the development of the material's total volume over time and of the individual atoms' oscillation about their ideal lattice positions. The domains' development corresponded with that of the total volume and the atom mobility. On the basis of these observations, we estimated the phase transition's onset.Exploratory visualization is a useful tool to gain insights into new data. So, our contest submission focused on interactive visualizations that facili-tated exploratory analysis of the given dataset. We integrated our visualizations in MegaMol (www. vis.uni-stuttgart.de/megamol), a flexible framework for visualizing large, dynamic particle datasets.

An Engineered Multifunctional Composite for Passive Sensing, Power Harvesting, and In Situ Damage Identification with Enhanced Mechanical Performance

“…Below the curie temperature (121 °C) in tetragonal BaTiO 3 crystals, the Ti 4+ are located away from the center and the O 2− are displaced from the face‐centered positions, which produces a net dipole moment. [ 36 ] When mechanically stressed, the Ti 4+ and O 2− ions move from their stable positions to generate electrical potential differences. However, the deposition process results in a random dispersion of the BaTiO 3 crystal dipole orientations resulting in no net orientation, so electrical poling is required to create a net dipole orientation to demonstrate a piezoelectric response in the bulk composite.…”

Methodologies for the analysis of instantaneous lipid diffusion in md simulations of large membrane systems

“…In material physics, vector field visualization has been used to detect phase transitions in large ferroelectric materials 27 . In computational biology, vector fields can be used to depict evolution of regulatory networks 59 or to study the role of water molecules in protein folding processes 60,61 .…”

“…There is therefore a substantial motivation to provide a simple and visually clear methodology to understand the complex dynamics of large-scale membrane systems. The challenge of computational visualization of very large systems has already been addressed in a number of areas of physics 27,28 . To some extent, visualization of very complex biomembrane systems, especially in the context of results from MD simulations, is less well developed.…”

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“…Scharnowski et al . [SKS*13] sampled dipole moments derived from the atomic positions to a grid and subsequently used the curl operator to separate similar regions in the resulting vector field. They rendered isosurfaces around these consistent regions.…”