School is back in session, so I figure now is as good a time as any to start writing again! In this series of posts I will discuss a subject that is a perennial favorite: the physical basis of crystal field theory. We will consider the origin of the infamous crystal field parameter 10Dq, and later dwell on the Slater/Racah parameters (F 0 /F 2 /F 4 and A/B/C, respectively).

Introduction

Crystal field theory (CFT) was first developed by Hans Bethe and John Van Vleck – two physicists who made significant contributions to the modern quantum-mechanical theory of magnetism. Beth and Van Vleck wanted to understand the paramagnetic behavior of simple transition metal salts (e.g. ferrous chloride). Their ideas grew from the theory of atomic electronic structure, which was relatively well developed at the time; and they elegantly showcase the power of group theory without requiring too much mathematical virtuosity on the part of the reader – a good combination, I think!

Before moving forward, we need to remind ourselves of a few things. First of all, we need to understand free ion terms. There are two ways we can think about them. For first row transition metal ions (TMI), the most commonly-used description comes from the Russell-Saunders (LS) coupling scheme introduced in most undergraduate inorganic chemistry classes. In the LS coupling scheme, the spin-orbit splitting of a given free ion term is taken as a perturbation on the relatively large crystal field splitting. This is in contrast to the splitting of lanthanide free ion terms, whose components’ characteristics are largely determined by spin-orbit coupling. The validity of the LS coupling scheme for first row TMIs follows from the fact that 1) the 3d orbitals are relatively small, leading to large coulomb/exchange integrals and 2) the magnitude of spin-orbit coupling has a quartic dependence on nuclear charge, and is therefore is small for first row metals.

Implicit in our choice of the LS coupling scheme is the notion that an ‘uncoupled’ basis of direct product microstates

can be used to construct good approximate descriptions of the components of first row TMI free ion terms. For example: a d1 electronic configuration yields a 2D free ion term which is split into 2D 5/2 and 2D 3/2 levels by S.O. coupling. The magnitude of the S.O. coupling is taken to be relatively small, however, so we turn our attention to the parent 2D term and its 10 constituent microstates (we will consider S.O. coupling later as a perturbation to the crystal field splitting).

CFT attempts to explain, in a perturbation-theoretic sense, how the components of a parent free ion term (2D in this example) are mixed by an external potential due to a symmetrical collection of point charges (i.e. ligands). In other words, we will be studying a sort of intramolecular Stark effect. This point of view is admittedly simplistic; but by throwing covalent contributions to bonding under the bus, we are free to focus our attention on the symmetry-determined aspects of electronic structure that I find most interesting.

The Crystal Field Hamiltonian as a Multipole Expansion

To understand how a 2D free ion term is split by a crystal field, we need to phrase the question in a way that is amenable to calculation. In other words, the way we represent the crystal field perturbation Hamiltonian should take advantage of whatever symmetry the problem has. We will consider an octahedral crystal field for the sake of simplicity, but what follows may be generalized to other cases without substantial effort.

Moving forward, the general strategy will be to expand in an appropriate (infinite) basis, and then use symmetry considerations to determine which terms in the expansion contribute to the physics at hand. Once we have chosen a suitably truncated representation of , we will study how it mixes the 10 components of a 2D free ion term into E g and T 2g levels split by 10Dq.

The angular components of the 2D basis states may be represented by spherical harmonics, i.e.

Spherical harmonics have a number of nice algebraic properties which we can utilize if we expand as a series of spherical harmonics sharing the same coordinate origin as the metal-centered basis states (i.e. as a multipole expansion):

where scalar properties of the potential have been subsumed into the constant (which I will promptly drop and forget about until later posts).

As written, this expansion isn’t terribly useful. The rules of vector coupling allow us to perform a massive truncation, however: two states for which l=2 can be only be coupled by components of having l =2+2=4.

.

Next, we take advantage of the octahedral symmetry of : the potential must remain invariant under O h symmetries, i.e. it must transform as the totally symmetric (a 1g ) representation of O h . Right off the bat, then, we can toss out the and terms, as they are ungerade and therefore cannot contribute to the totally symmetric potential. The contribution from the component affects all d orbitals equivalently (since transforms as a 1g ), so it is uninteresting to us. The components, which transform like the 5 d orbitals, are mixed into e g and t 2g sets (in accord with the symmetry of the potential); no linear combination of the spans a 1g , so these components are also uninteresting to us.

This leaves the set, which we consider a bit more carefully. First, we formalize our statement about invariance of under O h symmetries by insisting . Now suppose . Then

The coefficients of the , , and components remain invariant, so some linear combination of these components transforms as a 1g . To understand the nature of this linear combination, we investigate the action of a few more symmetry operations on . Suppose . Then

From this manipulation, we see , i.e. (ignoring normalization) . To find the value of the remaining coefficient c, we consider one final equation. Suppose . In this case, it is helpful to write out the spherical harmonics in their cartesian form (modulo a multiplicative factor of :

It follows that

Since the two previous expressions must be equivalent, we can solve for c by collecting terms in z4, and ultimately arrive at

which leaves us with a suitable representation of (modulo the constant describing its magnitude):

In the next post, we will apply this perturbation Hamiltonian to a 2D free ion term, characterize the resulting states, and hopefully gain a detailed understanding of how the d orbitals mix and split in the presence of an octahedral crystal field!