Monthly Archives: December 2013

IR and Raman spectra calculated with Quantum Espresso

Infrared (IR) and Raman spectra are two very valuable tools for the characterization of chemical compounds. And although there seem to be many different possibilities to produce them computationally, I didn’t find any clear tutorial on how to produce them using free software tools. Some of them, give complicated instructions on how to calculate second derivatives or Raman tensors, or stuff like that, but in the end one wonders: Where are the numbers I have to plot!

…Thereby, here is my post about computing IR and Raman spectra with Quantum Espresso.

For the impatient: most of this post is resumed in my Quantum Espresso example for the PHonon code, which will run for some 15-17 minutes and pop-up the IR/Raman spectra of CO2 and ZnO (Wurtzite).

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cube2xyz: convert cube data to xyz and slize segments/planes

In this post, I introduce my new cube2xyz script for converting cube data into “x,y,z,value” format and optionally creating nice 2D or 3D plots displaying the value of the cube property along a segment or a surface.

.cube files are originally from the Gaussian molecular modeling code, but nowadays can be produced and read by most of the computational chemistry programs. They consist of a lot of blocks of data describing the values of a measured property (charge, spin polarization, electronic density, …) on each point of the space inside the simulation cell.

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