On the sensitivity of hard X-ray spectroscopies to the chemical state of Br

Abstract

The sensitivity of the 1s X-ray emission and high-energy-resolution fluorescence-detected X-ray absorption spectroscopies (XES and HERFD-XAS) to resolve the variations in the chemical state (electronic structure and local coordination) of Br has been investigated for a selected set of compounds including NaBrO₃, NH₄Br and C₂H₄Br₂ (1,2-dibromoethane). For the Br K-edge XAS, employing the HERFD mode significantly increases the energy resolution, which demonstrates that with a crystal spectrometer used as a detector the absorption technique becomes a more powerful analytical tool. In the case of XES, the experimental results as well as the density functional theory (DFT) modeling both show that the chemical sensitivity of the main 1s diagram emission lines (Kα_1,2 and Kβ_1,3) is rather limited. However, the valence-to-core (Kβ₂) region of XES displays significant shape and intensity variations, as expected for transitions having the same final states as those of photoemission spectroscopy. The spectra are in good agreement with the molecular orbital description delivered by DFT calculations. Calculations for an extended series of Br compounds confirm that valence-to-core XES can serve as a probe for chemical analysis, and, being a hard X-ray photon-in/photon-out technique, it is particularly well-suited for in situ investigations of molecular transformations, even on the ultrafast time scales down to femtosecond time resolution.