Crystal field theory history

Brief history of lanthanide crystal field theory. 575... 

The spectroscopic properties of ruby have been studied for over one hundred years starting with the work by Becquerel (1867), who excited ruby with sunlight. He claimed that the properties of this crystal were intrinsic, but later it was shown that the color as well as the luminescence of ruby are due to the Cr ion that plays the role of an optical center in the nonabsorbing AI2O3 host. Only much later these properties could be explained by considering the influence of the surroundings of the Cr center on its energy levels (crystal-field theory). For a summary of ruby history the reader is referred to ref. 1. 

The result was published in 1939 as The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals An Introduction to Modern Structural Chemistry. It would become the most important Baker lecture book ever printed, and one of the most-cited scientific texts in history. In a very basic way, this book changed the course of chemistry. For the first time, the discipline was explained not as a collection of facts tied together by practical application in the laboratory but as a field unified by an underlying physical theory Pauling s quantum-mechanical ideas about the chemical bond. By showing how the new physics explained the chemical bond, how those bonds explained the structure of molecules, and how molecules structure explained their behavior, Pauling showed for the first time, as the Nobel Prize-winner Max Perutz said, that chemistry could be understood rather than memorized. ... 

The history of gas hydrate research, its physical and thermodynamics properties, and the impact on energy and the environment have been presented in several excellent books and reviews.This chapter is focused on the molecular aspect, particularly, on the application of different computational methods to investigate structural and thermodynamic stability, guest and lattice dynamics, thermal transport and mechanisms for homogeneous and heterogeneous crystallization. Even within this restricted choice of topics, there are numerous contributions to the modelling of hydrate properties. This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive review on the field of computational gas hydrate research. Even within the topics chosen no attempt was made to exhaustively review available literatures and competing theories. Rather, the... 

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