As it results from the very nature of things, the spherical symmetry of the surrounding of a site in a crystal lattice or an atom in a molecule can never occur. Therefore, the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of any bound ion or atom have to differ from those of spherically symmetric respective free ions. In this way, the most simplified concept of the crystal field effect or ligand field effect in the case of individual molecules can be introduced.
The conventional notion of the crystal field potential is narrowed to its non-spherical part only through ignoring the dominating spherical...