Electronic structure crystal fields

The response of liquid crystal molecular orientation to an electric field is another major characteristic utilised for many years in industrial applications [44] and more recently in studies of electrically-induced phase transitions [45]. The ability of the director to align along an external field again results from the electronic structure of the individual molecules. 

In the operation of ferroelectric liquid crystal devices, the applied electric field couples directly to the spontaneous polarisation Ps and response times depend on the magnitude E Ps. Depending on the electronic structure (magnitude and direction of the dipole moment as well as position and polarity of the chiral species) and ordering of the molecules P can vary over several orders of magnitude (3 to 1.2 x 10 ), giving response times in the range 1-100 ps. 

Instead, we believe the electronic structure changes are a collective effect of several distinct processes. For example, at surfaces the loss of the bulk symmetry will induce electronic states with different DOS compared to bulk. As the particle sizes are decreased, the contribution of these surface related states becomes more prominent. On the other hand, the decrease of the coordination number is expected to diminish the d-d and s-d hybridization and the crystal field splitting, therefore leading to narrowing of the valence d-band. At the same time, bond length contraction (i.e. a kind of reconstruction ), which was observed in small particles [89-92], should increase the overlap of the d-orbitals of the neighboring atoms, partially restoring the width of the d-band. 

In a crystal-field picture, the electronic structure of iron in the five-coordinate compounds is usually best represented by a (d yf idyz, 4cz) ( zO configuration [66, 70], as convincingly borne out by spin-unrestricted DFT calculations on the Jager compound 20 [68]. The intermediate spin configuration with an empty d 2 yi orbital in the CF model, however, has a vanishing valence contribution to the... 

Literature data are available on the electronic structures of two more binuclear technetium complexes [(NHjLlOHLTcf/i-O TcfOH NHj ] (a hypothetical complex with the structure and composition analogous to those of the ethylen-diamminetetra-acetate complex [54,55]) and Tc2(CO)10 (a binuclear complex with strong crystal field ligands [168,169]. We shall consider the results of these calculations in greater detail. 

I shall take the simple view that most metal oxide structures are derivatives of a closest packed 02 lattice with the metal ions occupying tetrahedral or octahedral holes in a manner which is principally determined by size, charge (and hence stoichiometry) and d configuration (Jj). The presence of d electrons can lead to pronounced crystal field effects or metal-metal bonding. The latter can lead to clustering of metal atoms within the lattice with large distortions from idealized (ionic) geometries. 

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