Analysis and Visualisation of Electric Fields and Charges in Mathematica

Tyrone Curtis - Honours student, School of Physical Sciences, University of Queensland

This page represents a summary of the work completed by Tyrone Curtis and Edan Scriven as research assistants for Professor Bernard Pailthorpe over Summer 2005/2006. These files were written to visualize molecules using data generated by the Molecular Dynamics program Gromacs and because there weren't many programs like this already in existence. It is hoped that these notebooks will aid in the understanding of the electrical properties of systems being studied.

All Mathematica files were generated using Mathematica 5.1. As such, there may be incompatibilities with earlier versions of Mathematica.

The files located on the following pages are free to download and use.

2D Visualization of Electric Fields and Electric Potential of Point Charges
A Mathematica notebook for generating equipotentials and field lines for point charges in a 2D plane. Also features a Mathematica package for labelling contour plots.

2D Visualization of Electric Fields of Point Charges around a Dielectric Interface
Includes a Mathematica notebook for plotting equipotentials and field lines for point charges on either side of an interface between media of different dielectric constants.

3D Visualization of Electric Fields of Point Charges
Includes a Mathematica notebook for plotting the field lines for a system of point charges in 3D.

3D Visualization of electric fields of charges from Gromacs
Includes a Mathematica notebook for importing molecular data from Gromacs .gro and .top files, as well as plotting the field lines for the molecules. Also features a Mathematica package for importing the Gromacs data into Mathematica.

Field lines of an electric dipole

Mathematica code generated with the help of the following texts:

Wickham-Jones, Tom. (1994). Mathematica Graphics - Techniques and Applications. Springer-Verlag. New York.
Trott, Michael. (2006). The Mathematica GuideBook for Numerics. Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. New York.

Mathematica is a registered trademark of Wolfram Research, Inc.