Tetrahedral crystal field splitting
ID: tetrahedral-crystal-field-splitting
In the ideal tetrahedral point-charge model, the five metal d orbitals split into a lower twofold set and an upper threefold set. Relative to their weighted barycentre their energies are and , where is the separation. For occupancies , the crystal field stabilization energy is . Under weak-field high-spin filling it is , , and zero for respectively. Shorter metal–ligand distances generally increase the splitting, so orbital filling can superimpose nonmonotonic bond-length changes on an ionic-size trend. The model alone does not determine an absolute bond length.
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