PNNL

Abstract

The XPS of many oxides are quite complex and there may be several peaks of significant intensity for each subshell. These peaks arise from many-electron effects, which normally are treated with configuration interaction (CI) wavefunctions where static correlation effects are taken into account. It is common to use semiempirical methods to determine the matrix elements of the CI Hamiltonian and there are few rigorous CI calculations where parameters are not adjusted to fit experiment. In contrast, we present, in the present work, theoretical XPS spectra obtained with rigorous CI wavefunctions for CeO2 where the XPS are especially complex; several different core levels are studied. This study uses an embedded CeO8 cluster model to represent bulk CeO2 and the relativistic CI wavefunctions are determined using four-component spinors from Dirac-Fock calculations. In particular, we examine the importance of interatomic many-body effects where there is a transfer of electrons from occupied oxygen 2p orbitals into empty cation orbitals as it is common to ascribe the complex XPS to this effect. We also contrast the importance of many-body charge-transfer effects for the isoelectronic cations of Ce4+ and La3+. The long-range goal of this work is to relate the XPS features to the nature of the chemical bonding in CeO2 and we describe our progress toward this goal.