X-ray spectroscopies through damped linear response theory

Abstract

In order to reach a fundamental understanding of interactions between electromagnetic radiation and molecular materials, experimental measurements need to be supplemented with theoretical models and simulations. With the use of this combination, it is possible to characterize materials in terms of, e.g., chemical composition and molecular structure, as well as achieve time-resolution in studies of chemical reactions. This doctoral thesis focuses on the development and evaluation of theoretical methods with which, amongst others, X-ray absorption and X-ray emission spectroscopies can be interpreted and predicted. In X-ray absorption spectroscopy the photon energy is tuned such that core electrons are targeted and excited to either bound or continuum states, and X-ray emission spectroscopy measures the subsequent decay from such an excited state. These core excitations/de-excitations exhibit strong relaxation effects, making theoretical considerations of the processes particularly challenging. While the removal of a valence electron leaves the remaining electrons relatively unaffected, removing core electrons has a substantial effect on the other electrons due to the significant change in the screening of the nucleus. Additionally, the core-excited states are embedded in a manifold of valence-excited states that needs to be considered by some computationally feasible method. In this thesis, a damped formalism of linear response theory, which is a perturbative manner of considering the interactions of (weak) external or internal fields with molecular systems, has been utilized to investigate mainly the X-ray absorption spectra of small-to medium-sized molecular systems.Amongst the standard quantum chemical methods available, coupled cluster is perhaps the most accurate, with a well-defined, hierarchical manner of approaching the correct electronic wave function. Combined with response theory, it provides a reliable theoretical method in which relaxation effects are addressed by means of an accurate treatment of electron correlation. The first part of this thesis deals with the development and evaluation of such an approach, and it is shown that the relaxation effects can be addressed by the inclusion of double excitations in the coupled cluster manifold. However, these calculations are computationally very demanding, and in order to treat larger systems the performance of the coupled cluster approach has been compared to that of the less demanding method of timedensity dependent functional theory (TDDFT). Both methods have been used to v vi investigate the X-ray absorption spectrum of water, which has been extensively debated in the scientific community following a relatively recent hypothesis concerning the underlying structure of liquid water. Water exhibits a great number of anomalous properties that stand out from those of most compounds, and the importance of reaching a fundamental understanding of this substance cannot be overstated. It has been demonstrated that TDDFT yields excellent results for liq...

Core-hole delocalization for modeling X-ray spectroscopies: A cautionary tale

“…This can also be done using frozen core or valence orbitals, with core-valence contribution being the remaining MP2 energy of the full-space calculation. 98 As seen in Fig. 7, the largest difference lies in the corevalence correlation contribution of the delocalized CH, which is about 9 eV larger than the near-zero core-valence contributions of the ground state and localized CH.…”