Spherical harmonics example — mayavi 4.7.1 documentation

# Spherical harmonics example

Plot spherical harmonics on the surface of the sphere, as well as a 3D polar plot.

This example requires scipy.

In this example we use the mlab’s mesh function: `mayavi.mlab.mesh()`. For plotting surfaces this is a very versatile function. The surfaces can be defined as functions of a 2D grid.

For each spherical harmonic, we plot its value on the surface of a sphere, and then in polar. The polar plot is simply obtained by varying the radius of the previous sphere.

Python source code: `spherical_harmonics.py`

    # Author: Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoquaux@normalesup.org>
    # Copyright (c) 2008, Enthought, Inc.
    # License: BSD Style.

    from mayavi import mlab
    import numpy as np
    from scipy.special import sph_harm

    # Create a sphere
    r = 0.3
    pi = np.pi
    cos = np.cos
    sin = np.sin
    phi, theta = np.mgrid[0:pi:101j, 0:2 * pi:101j]

    x = r * sin(phi) * cos(theta)
    y = r * sin(phi) * sin(theta)
    z = r * cos(phi)

    mlab.figure(1, bgcolor=(1, 1, 1), fgcolor=(0, 0, 0), size=(400, 300))
    mlab.clf()
    # Represent spherical harmonics on the surface of the sphere
    for n in range(1, 6):
        for m in range(n):
            s = sph_harm(m, n, theta, phi).real

            mlab.mesh(x - m, y - n, z, scalars=s, colormap='jet')

            s[s < 0] *= 0.97

            s /= s.max()
            mlab.mesh(s * x - m, s * y - n, s * z + 1.3,
                      scalars=s, colormap='Spectral')

    mlab.view(90, 70, 6.2, (-1.3, -2.9, 0.25))
    mlab.show()