Orbital quenching
= Orbital quenching
Suppression of a ground state's orbital <magnetic moment> by the splitting and mixing of free-ion <atomic orbitals> in a crystal. A nondegenerate orbital state can generally be chosen real in zero field, giving zero expectation of the imaginary <orbital angular momentum> operator. <Spin-orbit coupling> to excited states still produces residual <g-factor> shifts and anisotropy, so quenching is not absence of every orbital response.