About this Symmetry Tutorial

This tutorial was created for the sophmore-junior level Inorganic Chemistry course at Otterbein College. It is hoped that this will serve as a useful resource for other students around the world. Please send comments to djohnston@otterbein.edu.

Chime-specific Information

Several features of the Chime plug-in were exploited to created the displays and animations in this tutorial. The pmesh surface display feature of Chime was used to display the symmetry axes and symmetry planes. Animations were created using XYZ files with each atom defined twice; one set of atoms fixed and the others animated. The Javascript/Chime call-back mechanism (IMBIF) described by Eric Martz was used to control the display of symmetry elements and animations. For additional details on the construction of these pages, see the Technical Details page.

Web Content and HTML

HTML pages were created using Adobe GoLive. Graphics were created using Adobe Photoshop and POV-Ray. Molecular structures were constructed using HyperChem and some hand editing. Animations and PMESH surfaces were constructed in part using Excel spreadsheets.