Identifying duplicate crystal structures: XtalComp, an open-source solution Original Research Article

We describe the implementation of XtalComp, an efficient, reliable, and open-source library that tests if two crystal descriptions describe the same underlying structure. The algorithm has been tested and found to correctly identify duplicate structures in spite of the “real-world” difficulties that arise from working with numeric crystal representations: degenerate unit cell lattices, numerical noise, periodic boundaries, and the lack of a canonical coordinate origin. The library is portable, open, and not dependent on any external packages. A web interface to the algorithm is publicly accessible at .