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Material Comparator

Compare properties of up to 5 materials side-by-side in a unified table view.

Apr 10, 20264 min read
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Material Comparator

The comparator lets you place up to five materials side-by-side to evaluate their properties, crystal structures, and application suitability scores in a single view.

Adding Materials to Compare

There are three ways to add materials to the comparator:

  1. From search results: Click the compare checkbox on any material card in the search results
  2. From detail pages: Click the "Add to Compare" button on a material detail page
  3. Direct entry: Type material IDs into the comparator search bar (e.g., mp-149, mp-2534)

Comparison Table

The comparator displays a table with materials as columns and properties as rows:

| Property | Material 1 | Material 2 | Material 3 | |—————|—————-|—————-|—————-| | Formula | Si | GaAs | CdTe | | Band gap (eV) | 1.11 | 1.42 | 1.44 | | Crystal system | Cubic | Cubic | Cubic | | Density (g/cm3) | 2.33 | 5.32 | 5.85 | | Ehull (eV/atom) | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 |

The best value in each row is highlighted in green, making it easy to spot which material excels at each property.

Visual Comparisons

Beyond the property table, the comparator offers:

  • Radar chart: A spider plot showing normalized properties for all compared materials on the same axes
  • Crystal structures: Side-by-side 3D viewers for visual structural comparison
  • Application scores: Bar charts comparing suitability scores across all applications

Filtering Properties

Not all properties are relevant for every comparison. Use the property filter to show only the rows that matter for your analysis. Common presets include:

  • Electronic: Band gap, DOS effective mass, dielectric constant
  • Thermodynamic: Formation energy, Ehull, decomposition products
  • Mechanical: Bulk modulus, shear modulus, Poisson ratio
  • Basic: Formula, space group, density, volume

Sharing Comparisons

The comparator state is encoded in the URL. Copy the URL to share a specific comparison set with collaborators. The URL format is:

https://matcraft.ai/compare?ids=mp-149,mp-2534,mp-406

Export

Export the comparison table as CSV or as a formatted PDF report suitable for inclusion in research documents.