3.

9 Double Groups 123

of the Ce3+ ion which has the configuration 4f’. According to Hund’s
third rule, the total angular momentum in the ground state is J =
a
L - S = 3 - = 5/2, a half-integer value. The ground state multiplet
of an isolated Ce3+ ion is sixfold degenerate.
In Section 3.5 we learned how to treat the splitting of the odd-
dimensional representations of the rotation group in a crystal field. Now
let us consider the splitting of the 6-fold degenerate ground state level
in a cubic crystal field. A thorough discussion would be lengthy but we
will be taking convenient shortcuts.
To start with, let us accept the plausible result that the formula
(3.25) for the character of a rotation, which we derived for integer an-
gular momenta, is valid for half-integer values of J as well

(3.73)

It is easy to verify that

XJ@ + 2n) = ( - 1 ) 2 J X J ( a ) * (3.74)

We might have expected that the character is the same for an ( a 2n)- +
rotation 89 for an a-rotation, since a %-rotation should leave things
unchanged. This is not always so: for half-integral J , we find that the
+
character is double-valued x ~ ( a 27r) = - x J ( ( . Y ) . In particular, for
+
a = 0 , x j ( 2 n ) = -(2J 1). - The double-valuedness of the character
has the same origin as the minus sign found for the 2n-rotation of the
electron spin in (3.47).
Actually, we should note that the character is double-valued only
for a # T . From (3.73) it follows that

Bethe showed how to deal with this strange situation by enlarging

the group to a double group so that every character becomes single-
valued. Let us introduce the fiction that the 2n-rotation R is a new
group element, different from the identity. On the other hand, the 4n-
rotation behaves like the identity since

x J ( a f 4T) = xJ(a). (3.76)