TEV—A Program for the Determination of the Thermal Expansion Tensor from Diffraction Data

Abstract

TEV (Thermal Expansion Visualizing) is a user-friendly program for the calculation of the thermal expansion tensor αij from diffraction data. Unit cell parameters determined from temperature dependent data collections can be provided as input. An intuitive graphical user interface enables fitting of the evolution of individual lattice parameters to polynomials up to fifth order. Alternatively, polynomial representations obtained from other fitting programs or from the literature can be entered. The polynomials and their derivatives are employed for the calculation of the tensor components of αij in the infinitesimal limit. The tensor components, eigenvalues, eigenvectors and their angles with the crystallographic axes can be evaluated for individual temperatures or for temperature ranges. Values of the tensor in directions parallel to either [uvw]’s of the crystal lattice or vectors (hkl) of reciprocal space can be calculated. Finally, the 3-D representation surface for the second rank tensor and pre- or user-defined 2-D sections can be plotted and saved in a bitmap format. TEV is written in JAVA. The distribution contains an EXE-file for Windows users and a system independent JAR-file for running the software under Linux and Mac OS X. The program can be downloaded from the following link: http://www.uibk.ac.at/mineralogie/downloads/TEV.html (Institute of Mineralogy and Petrography, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria)

Keywords

• thermal expansion tensor
• diffraction
• representation surfaces
• computer program