The IEEE Visualization Contest 2012 targets the field of computational material science. The challenge was to develop visualization and interaction methods to answer detect and analyze phase transitions (ferroelectric and polarization domains) in barium titanate. Visualization questions and tasks are how the formation of domains based on atom displacements occurs, which mathematical descriptor can best describe the change of polarization in the vector field, whether there is an evolution in the atoms' trajectory, which could suggest a phase transition, and many more.

The contest aims at demonstrating how novel visualization and interaction techniques from the fore-front of scientific research can help to solve real-world problems of high relevance.

SciVis Contest Chairs

Gabriel Zachmann, Clausthal University of Technology
 Jean Favre, Swiss Center for Scientific Computing

Winner:
Visualization of Polarization Domains in Barium Titanate
Katrin Scharnowski, Michael Krone, Philipp Beck, Filip Sadlo

Second Place:
Visual Analysis of Phase Transitions and Polarisation Domains in Barium Titanate
Florian Lindemann, Tobias Brix, Stefan Diepenbrock Jörg-Stefan Praßni, Bernd Hemmer, Sören Linnemann, Paul Weingardt, Gerhard Wilde, Klaus Hinrichs

Third Place:
Visualization of Barium Titanate Phase Transition using Quantization of Dipole Moment Vectors
Henry Lehmann, Patrick Heyne, Oliver Mothes, Heiko Müller, Tim Smyth, Erik Berger, Katja Fiedler, David Vogt, Bernhard Jung