Hi Togo, Albert,

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Atz Togo <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 1:41 AM, David Lonie <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Interesting -- It sounds like refine cell may be converting the
>> primitive cell back to a conventional cell?
>
> Yes. It reduces to a conventional unit cell. A primitive lattice of a
> conventional unit cell that has centring can be obtained by
> multiplying a transformation matrix that is referred to the
> International table of crystallography vol. A. Furthermore, when using
> spg_refine_cell, the crystallographic axes are redefined in Cartesian
> coordinates. So if the lattice vectors are stored in a 3x3 matrix in
> Cartesian coordinates, they may be re-oriented. This re-orientation
> does not happen in spg_find_primitive.

It's good to hear from you again -- thank you for the clarification.
As the author of spglib, your guidance here is very useful.

The current reduceToPrimitive function is here:

http://github.com/dlonie/avogadro/blob/master/libavogadro/src/extensions/crystallography/avospglib.cpp#L226

What it does is:

(1) Determine the spacegroup of the cell with spg_get_international
(2) Clean up the structure with spg_refine_cell
(3) Reduce the cell to it's primitive representation with spg_find_primitive
(4) Update the molecule with the new cell matrix and coordinates

The coordinates, lattice matrix, etc are kept in the same arrays
throughout the process, so if refine_cell is changing the orientation,
it should not matter since the reoriented matrix and refined
coordinates are passed to the find_primitive function. I cannot see
how calling the refine_cell function before the reduction would break
the behavior, but I may be missing something.

As a side note, I've recently started using your phonopy software
after giving up a fight with PHON (it wouldn't recognize the symmetry,
and doesn't seem to have an adjustable tolerance...). Phonopy is a
wonderful tool, and I'm especially impressed by the matplotlib
integration. I've been recommending it to my coworkers -- keep up the
good work! :-)

Dave

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