Hydrogen Atom Orbitals

Voladd

About this app

The electron orbitals of the hydrogen atom describe the wave-like behavior of an electron in atom and they determine the probability to find it in a particular space region. Mathematically the orbitals are determined by the hydrogen atom wave functions of its energy eigenstates and the wave functions themselves are determined as the solution to the quantum mechanical Schroedinger equation.

This app visualizes the electron orbitals of the hydrogen atom in 3D by drawing the cross-section surfaces of the electron probability density in OpenGL and using the Marching Cubes algorithm.

Features:
- Select the electron orbital to visualize by specifying the quantum number n, l and m, or pick the random one.
- Change the discretization step size.
- Choose the total probability to find electron inside the drawn orbital surface.
- Zoom and rotate the orbital with your fingers.

Source code of the app is available under the MIT License at https://github.com/vlvovch/hydrogen-atom-orbitals

Ratings and reviews

Good app, couple things, the resolution is a bit low for some of the larger orbitals, maybe have an option to increase that. Can't see relative sizes of the orbitals which is what I was looking for. Liked the percentage.

For just a few 100 kBs, great collection of orbitals for quick reference. Just wanted to ask: what program was used to plot the orbitals? Looks very much like the scheme Mathematica, smooth isosurfaces.

This is very decent app, I tried graphing the eigenfunctions using MATLAB for a presentation but my coding sucks so I ended up just using pictures. Wish I had this app back then ;-;

What’s new

Updated to target Android 14