116 Ch.

3 Crystal Field Theory

rt4

energy
(in meV)

Figure 3.9: The five lowest levels of a uranium ion in URu2Si2, after [346]. The
order of the levels depends on assumptions about the crystal potential.

new effects appear.

Using the character table 3.5 (page 135), we can easily check that
in a tetragonal crystal field, the f 2 configuration splits into five singlets
and two doublets
rJ=4= 2rt1 CBrt2CB rt3CB rt4CB 2rt5. (3.61)
For an application, we may consider the interesting and much-studied
substance URu2Si2, in which U4+ ions are sitting in a tetragond envi-
ronment. Remarkably, in spite of long and painstaking work, the precise
sequence of the crystal field levels is still not quite certain [345]. There
seems to be consensus that the lowest (three or four) levels are singlets,
and these are followed by a higher-lying doublet, but it is not clear
which singlet is the ground state. For the sake of the present argument,
let us assume [345] that the ground state is rt3, and that this is fullowed
by the low-lying singlets r t l , and rt2, the somewhat higher-lying dou-
blet r t 5 , and the singlet I't4 (Fig. 3.9). The remaining two levels are
irrelevant for our argument. - We emphasize that the physics which we
will be describing, could similarly arise from other level schemes.
Recalling (A.22), and using the same notations as in (3.56), we iden-
tify the I't3 ground state as

(3.62)