to_zmat

Cartesian.to_zmat(buildlist=None, fragment_list=None, check_linearity=True)[source]

Transform to internal coordinates.

Transforming to internal coordinates involves basically three
steps:
  1. Define an order of how to build.
  2. Check for problematic local linearity. In this algorithm an
    angle with 170 < angle < 10 is assumed to be linear. This is not the mathematical definition, but makes it safer against “floating point noise”
  3. Calculate the bond lengths, angles and dihedrals using the
    references defined in step 1 and 2.

In the first two steps a so called buildlist is created. This is basically a np.array of shape (n_atoms, 4) and

integer type.
The four columns are ``[‘own_index’, ‘bond_with’, ‘angle_with’,
‘dihedral_with’]``.
This means that usually the upper right triangle can be any
number, because for example the first atom has no other atom as reference.
It is important to know, that getting the buildlist is a very
costly step since the algoritym tries to make some guesses based on the connectivity to create a “chemical” zmatrix.
If you create several zmatrices based on the same references
you can save the buildlist of a zmatrix with Zmat.build_list().
If you then pass the buildlist as argument to to_zmat,
then the algorithm directly starts with step 3.

Another thing is that you can specify fragments. For this purpose the function Cartesian.get_fragment()

is quite handy.

An element of fragment_list looks like:

(fragment, connections)
Fragment is a Cartesian instance and connections is a
(3, 4) numpy integer array, that defines how the fragment is connected to the molecule.
Parameters:
  • buildlist (np.array) –
  • fragment_list (list) –
  • check_linearity (bool) –
Returns:

A new instance of Zmat.

Return type:

Zmat