International Tables for Crystallography

Volume D: Physical properties of crystals


Tenχar: Calculations with tensors and characters


M. Ephraïm, T. Janssen, A. Janner and A. Thiers


Tenχar enables the calculation of invariant tensors of different dimension and rank and with various permutation symmetries under the action of a chosen three-dimensional point group (complementing Chapter 1.1 of Volume D) and also allows the character tables associated with finite point groups to be viewed and manipulated (complementing Chapter 1.2 of Volume D). A short introduction to this package is given in Section 1.2.7 of Volume D.

This package was written in 1998 for the International Union of Crystallography and was first distributed on the CD-ROM accompanying the first print edition of International Tables for Crystallography Volume D in 2003. Versions are available for Microsoft Windows 95 and later, for Linux and for FreeBSD-2.2.

  • Manual
  • Installation
    • Windows: Install Tenχar
    • Linux/FreeBSD:
      1. Download tar archive tenxar.tar
      2. Extract files from archive into a suitable directory: e.g.
        cd /usr/local
        tar xvf tenxar.tar
        (an alternative location to /usr/local may be chosen at the user's discretion)
      3. Set the environment variable VOLD_CONFIG to the location of the software configuration file:

        for csh or similar shells add to the user's .login file
        setenv VOLD_CONFIG /usr/local/TenXar/vol-d/data/vol-d_config

        for sh, bash or similar shells add to the user's .profile file
        VOLD_CONFIG=/usr/local/TenXar/vol-d/data/vol-d_config export VOLD_CONFIG
      4. Add the location of the program executable to the user's PATH variable:

        for csh or similar shells add to the user's .login file
        set path = ($path /usr/local/TenXar/vol-d/bin/system)

        for sh, bash or similar shells add to the user's .profile file
        PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/TenXar/vol-d/bin/system export PATH
        where system should be replaced by the relevant operating system (freebsd-2.2 or linux)
      5. Run the application by invoking the program executable: tenxar