On Wednesday 12 of February 2014 17:43:25 Atsushi Togo wrote:
> Yes. I think there is no ambiguity. But we have to be careful about
> that it's still arbitrary with respect to lattice translation. So for
> this, we employ some convention, e.g., translation part (t) of a
> symmetry operation is restricted 0 <= t < 1.
> The decoding of Hall symbol is not difficult. You can do it following
> http://cci.lbl.gov/sginfo/hall_symbols.html .
> 
> I still have not yet understood what you want to do. But there may be
> other ambiguities, or say conventions. For example, there are reverse
> and observe settings of hexagonal rhombohedral (hR),  which gives 60
> degrees difference along c-axis, but gives, I guess, the same set of
> symmetry operations for a space group type. So spg_refine_cell always
> returns primitive rhombohedral (pR).
> 
> Togo

Thanks for clarification. I want to do two things. First, learn more about 
this topic, and I am very grateful for all your comments. Second, consider 
that Avogadro uses spglib to do spacegroup perception, cell refinement and 
similar. But it uses OpenBabel to do other things like filling the unit cell. 
Spglib cannot be used for this simply because it cannot work with an 
incomplete unit cell. Also, OpenBabel's spacegroup and unit cell functionality 
is accessible from anywhere in Avogadro because the data is stored in the 
OpenBabel's molecule structure. Therefore, it would be convenient if spglib 
and OpenBabel used compatible conventions.

To clarify further, I will summarize the problem. I assumed (correctly, as you 
stated) that spg_refine_cell puts the cell into spglib's "native" setting. I 
then compared the symmetry operations in the spglib database to those in 
OpenBabel's database. I found that they were the same in almost all cases, 
except for groups indexed by Hall symbols B -2bc, R 3 -2", F 4d 2 3 and P 4 2 
3 -1n". Which means that for these four groups, when we use spg_refine_cell, 
we obtain a cell which is not compatible with OpenBabel.

What is worse, I tried taking a cubic cell, choosing F 4d 2 3, placing a 
single atom and calling Fill Unit Cell, which uses OpenBabel. After that, 
Perceive Spacegroup, which uses Spglib, detected F -4c 2 3. When I repeated 
this procedure later, it detected -F 4c 2 3. This kind of thing did not happen 
with -P 3*.

I am not sure what to do about this. Do spglib or OpenBabel have incorrect 
data? Is it simply a different convention, and if so, what to do about it? 
Should we try to use only one of these libraries?

Regards
Jure


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