Development and accuracy evaluation of core-excited pseudopotentials using large-scale data

Kawai, Hiroyuki*; An, S.*; Ozaki, Taisuke*; Sekikawa, Takuya; Ono, Yoshiaki*

X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) is one of the most widely used techniques to study the chemical composition and electronic structure of materials near the surface. The physical quantity measured by XPS is essentially the energy value of the core electrons. On the other hand, theoretical calculations of the core-electron energy require the pseudopotential, which is the interaction energy between the excited core electrons and the surrounding nuclei and other electrons (core-excitation pseudopotential). In this study, we optimized many parameters necessary to obtain the core-excitation pseudopotential for Se using a Monte Carlo method, and produced a high-precision core-excitation pseudopotential for Se. Using this core-excitation pseudopotential, we calculated core-electron energy values for four Se compounds and found that they reproduced XPS measurements with high accuracy. The results of this study are expected to become a standard for theoretical calculations of XPS measurements in the future.