Steven's operators acting on L: Interpretation of parameters

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christiansen
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Steven's operators acting on L: Interpretation of parameters

Post by christiansen »

Dear Easyspin comminity

I have recently started working with actinide ions, and have therefore started building Hamiltonians directly from the L and S quantum numbers. In this case, the crystal field (CF), in the form of Steven's operators, act on L rather than S. Thus, Easyspin now parametrises the CF using CF_kq constants instead of B_kq that is normally used when Steven's operators act on S.

Is there any way to translate the CF_kq to the B_kq formalism to better compare with literature values for CF parameters?

Assuming that Easyspin uses Wybourne notation for Sys.CF, I tried using table A1 in this paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 492X#s0125 to translate reported Bk_q constants in a Steven's operator formalism to use with Easyspin. Unfortunately, my calculation using the reported parameters is still different than the results reported.

Best,
Rasmus

Stefan Stoll
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Re: Steven's operators acting on L: Interpretation of parameters

Post by Stefan Stoll »

The matrices for the CF parameters Sys.CF1 etc. are implemented in the EasySpin function ham_cf.m. Have a look at the source code of this function here. It looks like these are just Stevens operators, since ham_cf calls stev.

peter.kaden
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Re: Steven's operators acting on L: Interpretation of parameters

Post by peter.kaden »

I would second the question above.
Is there a possibility to let stev act on J instead of S and subsiquently calculate CF differently. It seems as L and S are not really suitable to describe 5f spin states correctly as we find significant zero-field contributions and expect a significant contribution from spin-orbit coupling in the actinides. Thus J would be the better quantum number.
Would it maybe be possible to implement a Opt.X setting to choose a different set of Okq or even Wybourne instead of Stevens nomenclature?
I tried to recalculate Wybourne data to Stevens using these parameter: https://www2.cpfs.mpg.de/~rotter/homepa ... de130.html
and subsequently compensate for the (not-suitable) Okq in the second stev step. However, this appears to be not working in my hands.

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