virtualdialog

Atoms are not tiny balls you can picture like planets. The electron in an atom is a wave, and its cloud has shapes you learn to read with a little practice: spheres, dumbbells, cloverleaves, rings. These shapes decide how atoms form molecules and why water is bent.

On this site you can explore those shapes yourself. Each chapter has a large, rotatable view, a few controls beneath it, and an explanation that changes with your selection.

How to use the site

• Dragging with mouse or finger rotates the 3D cloud. The “oblique” buttons jump to fixed views.
• Slice, projection, 3D show the same orbital in three ways: as a cut through the nucleus, as the shadow of the whole cloud, or in space.
• Colours show the sign of the wave function. Where the colour changes there is a node where the electron is never found.
• The text below the controls always explains exactly what you are looking at.

The views are computed right in your browser. No data is sent to a server and you do not need to install anything.