ELATE: An open-source online application for analysis and visualization of elastic tensors

Abstract

We report on the implementation of a tool for the analysis of second-order elastic stiffness tensors, provided with both an open-source Python module and a standalone online application providing visualization tools of anisotropic mechanical properties. After describing the software features, how we compute the conventional elastic constants and how we represent them graphically, we explain our technical choices for the implementation. In particular, we focus on why a Python module is used to generate the HTML web page with embedded Javascript for dynamical plots.