Theory of lanthanide crystal fields

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Abstract
Recent progress in understanding the origin of the lanthanide crystal field is summarized. The basic assumption of the crystal field parametrization is shown to be that the crystalline environment can be represented as a one-electron potential, and the consequences of removing this assumption are traced. It is further shown that overlap and covalency make the dominant contributions to the observed field, the electrostatic contributions only being inportant for the potential components with low angular dependence (i.e. the n=2 parameters). In some circumstances it is found that the observed parameters can usefully be analysed into superposed contributions from the neighbouring ions in the crystal. The importance of crystal field concepts in related problems is emphasized as well as the stimulus crystal field theory gives to the development of formalisms for dealing with non-orthogonal basis states.

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