Lattice Matching to Commercially Available Substrates
Designed by the Falson Lab at Caltech
This program is designed to help you find commercially available substrates that match the lattice parameters of your material. Learn more about the tool.
This program is designed to help you find commercially available substrates that match the lattice parameters of your material. Learn more about the tool.
This tool finds periodic substrate-film matches for simple crystal geometries (square/rectangular planes such as cubic (001), and triangular planes as in cubic (111) or hexagonal (0001)). Enter lattice parameters below the table to find the top matching substrates among those selected at left. For any substrate selection, the site also maps the best match at every point in 2D lattice parameter space (Voronoi diagram) and shows the quality of that match (Mismatch Heatmap).
Choose substrates and films in the Select Data panel. Film data comes from the Materials Project and can be filtered to obtain a class of films of interest. The substrates are all commercially available from Crystec, and empirical structural constants are used. The site precomputes reasonable superlattices which a film might match to; thus a particular substrate face might match about 10–15 different film geometries at different angles. Substrate superlattices are shown in colour and films as black points. Hovering over a substrate shows its MCIA and the geometry of each superlattice.
Click any film dot to update the table, or enter lattice parameters manually. The table then lists optimal matches. Change the sliders at left to customise the ranking.
The lattice mismatch formula is a measure of strain, a simple percentage difference between the matching lengths of substrate and film. Minimising the minimum coincident interface area (MCIA) also improves match quality, so a slider is offered to penalise large coincident areas; sliding to “Yes” removes that penalty entirely. Similarly, for square/rectangular faces you can favour single-axis matches (one axis very well aligned) or double-axis matches (both axes fairly well aligned). In the Display plot, a larger substrate dot means lower MCIA, and thus a better match, all else equal.
The Voronoi diagram shows the best matching substrate at every point in 2D parameter space, and the mismatch heatmap shows the quality of that best match. This many-to-many matching gives insight beyond growing a single film: it describes how to grow many films, identifies the most valuable substrates for a class of new materials, and shows which sets of substrates cover the widest range of lattice parameters.
This is the coincidence-site-lattice / domain-matching-epitaxy construction of Zur & McGill, J. Appl. Phys. 55, 378 (1984).
Filter films by the parameters below, then click Pull materials. Films with more than 3 elements or with lattice parameters exceeding 16 Å are excluded to keep the catalogue manageable. You may not select more than 1,000 film planes at a time.
No films selected