A new approach to the problem of the kinetic exchange
for orbitally degenerate ions is developed. The
constituent multielectron metal ions are assumed to be octahedrally
coordinated, and strong crystal field scheme
is employed, making it possible to take full advantage from the
symmetry properties of the fermionic operators
and collective electronic states. In the framework of the
microscopic approach, the highly anisotropic effective
Hamiltonian of the kinetic exchange is constructed in terms of spin
operators and standard orbital operators
(matrices of the unit cubic irreducible tensors). As distinguished
from previous considerations, the effective
Hamiltonian is derived for a most general case of the multielectron
transition metal ions possessing orbitally
degenerate ground states and for arbitrary topology of the system.
The overall symmetry of the system is
introduced through the restricted set of the one-electron transfer
integrals implied by the symmetry conditions.
All parameters of the effective Hamiltonian are expressed in terms
of the relevant transfer integrals and
fundamental parameters of the two moieties, namely crystal field and
Racah parameters for the metal ions in
their normal, reduced, and oxidized states. The developed approach
is applied to two kinds of systems:
edge-shared (D
2
h
) and
corner-shared (D
4
h
)
bioctahedral clusters. In the particular case of d
ions
(2T2−T2
problem) the energy pattern in both cases consists of several
multiplets splitted by the isotropic part of exchange.
In both cases we have found a weak ferromagnetic splitting for
several multiplets of the system. This splitting
is due to the competition of ferro- and antiferromagnetic contributions
arising from the high- and low-spin
reduced states in line with Anderson's considerations,
Goodenough−Kanamori rules, and McConnell
mechanism of ferromagnetic interaction. On the contrary, these
weak ferromagnetic interaction are found to
coexist with strong ferro- and antiferromagnetic contributions in which
only high-spin and low-spin excited
states are respectively involved. In addition to these unexpected
results in both topologies the ferro- and
antiferromagnenic contributions vanish separately for one of the level,
the last being thus paramagnetic. These
results are in a strike contradiction with the generally accepted point
of view on the ferromagnetic role of
orbital degeneracy in the magnetic exchange. They also show that
the simple qualitative models have a
restricted area of applications and that the peculiarities of the
exchange problem in the case of orbital degeneracy
are much more complicated. The energy pattern of the exchange
levels is closely related to the topology of
the system and to the network of the one-electron transfer intercenter
connections forming effective parameters
of the kinetic exchange in the case of orbital degeneracy.