A near-infrared investigation of the crystal-field splitting of the low-lying manifolds of the holmium ion in holmium vanadate

Abstract

Low-temperature measurements are reported of the optical transitions between the two ground-state manifolds 5I8 and 5I7 of Ho3+ in a holmium vanadate crystal. All 11 levels of the 5I7 manifold were determined and the results are shown to be exactly in agreement with the group theory predictions for a splitting in a D2d crystal field. A new set of crystal-field parameters is evaluated, which gives good agreement between theory and experiment.