Visualizing The Hydrogen Atom
Year
2026
Team Size
1 members
Status
Completed
A high-fidelity hydrogen wavefunction visualizer. The core is a compact set of GLSL ES graphics pipeline. An interactive web tool is built on top of it, a native static still exporter as well. A small Julia baking utility evaluates the analytical approximated wave function, performing the numerically sensitive parts at high precision and baking 1D look-up tables into a compact custom HORB format. At runtime, the shaders use these tables to reconstruct the separable wavefunction continuously in 3D space. The web tool comes with an exhaustive pre-bake of states up to n=25. The pipeline implements several direct volume rendering techniques, including maximum-intensity projection (MIP), emission–absorption (EA), MIDA. Planar cross-sections and multiple bisection-refined isosurfaces are also supported, with traditional surface/texture rendering. Supported features include variable resolution, custom color palette in OKLCH, visualizing by density or amplitude, coloring by value, sign or phase, and more. Real-time phase evolution, up to 6-way superposition are also supported.
