Abstract
The splitting of the fivefold degeneracy of free atom $d$ electron states by nonspherical components of a crystalline field is calculated. The crystal potential employed is that of a lattice of positive point charges screened by a uniform distribution of electrons. The calculation is done to first order in the cubic field, using hydrogenic electron wave functions. The triply degenerate $d$ state is lowered with respect to the doubly degenerate one in both body-centered and face-centered cubic lattices. Numerical results are given for both lattices. Finally, analytic atomic wave functions are used to estimate the splitting in iron and copper at the observed lattice spacing. The crystal field splitting of these levels is found to be much smaller than the overlap splitting as obtained in previous calculations for both materials.
Published Version
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