Crystal Viewer is an C++ based application developed to aid research on crystal structures, by providing a tool to analyze crystal structures of arbitrary dimensions, and generate projections onto lower dimensions in order to investigate transformations that connect various configurations.

Crystal structures represent a wide variety of materials. These structures such as body-centered cubic(bcc) and face-centered cubic(fcc) exist in diverse geometric arrangements, and even more so if quasicrystal(aperiodic crystals) structures are included. Understanding the transformation pathways between these structures such as the Bain transformation(fcc to bcc) is crucial to researching the various mechanisms of structural phase transformations and dynamic instabilities. However, the number of known pathways are limited, and the structural incommensurabilities present a computational challenge. This research is aimed at reconstructing the various 3D crystal structures from a common simpler crystalline lattice existing in 4D/5D or higher dimensions, from which we can easily explore transformation pathways that exist as rotations and other transformations in higher dimensions. By exploring a common parent structure at higher dimensions, we aim to explore the relations between the various topologies of crystal structures as well as quasicrystals, which are known to be mathematically derivable from projections of a higher dimensional periodic lattice.

Crystal Viewer currently requires:

• git
• cmake version 3.0 or higher
• C++ compiler (Visual Studio, g++, LLVM, etc)

From a terminal you can run:

./configure.sh

or on windows systems without bash:

./configure.bat

This will configure the project, and prepare it for compilation.

After the initial configuration, you can run

./run.sh

or on windows systems without bash:

./run.bat

This will compile the application, and run the binary if successful.

In order to run the application afterwards, you can just repeat the above command.

Alternatively, you can open the CMakeLists.txt proeject in an IDE like VS Code, Visual Studio or Qt Creator and have the IDE manage the configuration and execution of cmake.

If you need to delete the build:

./distclean.sh

on windows systems without bash:

./distclean.bat

should recursively clean all the build directories of the project including those of allolib and its submodules.

TINC is funded by NSF grant # OAC 2004693: "Elements: Cyber-infrastructure for Interactive Computation and Display of Materials Datasets."