From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_gmail.com)
Date: Sun Oct 21 2012 - 02:49:55 CDT

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 8:46 AM, Ijäs Mari <mari.ijas_at_aalto.fi> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I would like to visualize phonon displacement patterns from axsf files generated by Quantum Espresso*. The structural information appears to be read fine by vmd but I haven't yet figured out a way how to visualize the force vectors. Is this even possible in the current implementation?

no. that is not possible directly.

you would have to write a little program that projects the force vectors
for each mode on atoms and create an animation for each mode.

VMD was not originally designed to handle these kinds of cases.
there has been some preliminary work on importing this kind of
information from GAMESS calculations, but that is currently on
hold due to lack of interested programmers and has not resulted
in any relevant useful functionality in the VMD core anyway.

sorry,
    axel.

>
> I tried to search the mailing list archives but I apologize if I've missed the relevant thread(s).
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Mari Ijäs
> Graduate student
> Aalto University School of Science,
> Espoo, Finland
>
>
>
> * I know, using XCrysDen is the recommended way of doing this but I'd prefer to do this in VMD due to a number of reasons.

-- 
Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer  akohlmey_at_gmail.com  http://goo.gl/1wk0
International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. Italy.