Effect of crystal field on the spin density at the copper nucleus in copper complexes

The role of lower symmetry component of the crystal field in causing a mixing of excited 3d ^x−1 4s with the ground 3d ^x configuration and leading to spin density at the nucleus for iron group ions was suggested by Griffith and Orgel. This mechanism has been examined in detail for the two low-symmetry copper complexes, one square planar (D_4h symmetry) and the other distorted tetrahedron (D_2d symmetry) and the calculation has been performed using the powerful Racah method and tensor operator technique. It is found that for the two types of copper complexes, copper pthalocyanin (square planar, D_4h symmetry) and cesium copper chloride (distorted tetrahedron, D_2d symmetry) the contribution from this mechanism to the spin density at the nucleus vanishes identically.