Modeling XANES of U⁵⁺ and U⁶⁺ in different local coordination geometries

X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) is an invaluable tool in nuclear material research, allowing to probe the oxidation state and the local coordination of selected atomic species. The first part of the spectrum, the X-ray Near Edge Structure (XANES), is less exploited than the Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS). However XANES conceals a wealth of information on the electronic structure and on the local geometry around the absorber. What prevents XANES to become a more common technique is the complexity of its analysis, which still gives more qualitative than quantitative information. Nowadays important progresses in the interpretation of XANES have been made thanks to i) the development of dedicated ab-initio codes using powerful computational resources and ii) the use of High Energy Fluorescence Detected (HERFD) XANES, which boosted spectral resolution especially in the case of actinides. These recent developments make the systematic studies based on XANES simulations an invaluable tool to strengthen our understanding of XANES.
In this regards we present a detailed investigation on how the local coordination of U⁵⁺ and U⁶⁺ affects the U L₃ edge HERFD XANES. By simulating a large number of structures containing U⁵⁺ and/or U⁶⁺ in different local coordination geometries we found systematic trends, especially correlated with the presence of longer or shorter U – O bonds. It is well established that the presence of the short uranyl bond shows up in U L₃ edge XANES by the presence of a characteristic post-edge feature [1]. Interestingly, some experimental investigations reported that the uranyl post-edge feature shifts to lower energy when going from the uranyl to the uranate coordination, i.e. identical U – O distances [2,3]. Our systematic investigation confirms that this behavior correlates with the presence of U coordinated with 6 oxygen atoms in a regular octahedron and it is a consequence of the splitting of U 6d Density of States (DOS) induced by the crystal field. The possibility to detect the presence of U⁵⁺ in systems with both U⁵⁺ and U⁶⁺ by HERFD XANES will be discussed on the bases of our systematic investigation.