LaSCA: A Visualization Analysis Tool for Microstructure of Complex Systems

Abstract

Over the past few decades, plenty of visualization software for the structural analysis of disordered/complex systems has been developed, but the uniqueness and correctness of structural quantification for such systems are still challenging. This paper introduces a visualization analysis tool based on the largest standard cluster analysis (LaSCA), which satisfies the three essential requirements for general structural analysis: physical correctness, objective identification, and injective representation. The specific functionalities of LaSCA include the directed graph model of complex systems, novel structural parameters, topologically close-packed structures, arbitrary partial pair distribution functions, the identification of long-range ordered structures, the adaptive selection of graphical elements, the tracking display of atom ID, user-defined view angles, various options for atom selection, and so on. The program is efficiently based on OpenGL hardware acceleration, employing special algorithms to treat bonds as cylinders or lines and treat atoms as spheres, icosahedrons, tetrahedrons, or points. LaSCA can process more than 1.2 million atoms within 50 s on a PC with 1 GB memory and four cores (Intel Core i7-9700). It is robust and low-cost for surveying short-, medium-, and long-range ordered structures and tracking their evolutions.