Accurate quasiparticle calculation of x-ray photoelectron spectra of solids

It has been highly desired to provide an accurate and reliable method to calculate core electron binding energies (CEBEs) of crystals and to understand the final state screening effect on a core hole in high resolution x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), because the ΔSCF method cannot be simply used for bulk systems. We propose to use the quasiparticle calculation based on many-body perturbation theory for this problem. In this study, CEBEs of band-gapped crystals, silicon, diamond, β-SiC, BN, and AlP, are investigated by means of the GW approximation (GWA) using the full ω integration and compared with the preexisting XPS data. The screening effect on a deep core hole is also investigated in detail by evaluating the relaxation energy (RE) from the core and valence contributions separately. Calculated results show that not only the valence electrons but also the core electrons have an important contribution to the RE, and the GWA have a tendency to underestimate CEBEs due to the excess RE. This underestimation can be improved by introducing the self-screening correction to the GWA. The resulting C1s, B1s, N1s, Si2p, and Al2p CEBEs are in excellent agreement with the experiments within 1 eV absolute error range. The present self-screening corrected GW approach has the capability to achieve the highly accurate prediction of CEBEs without any empirical parameter for band-gapped crystals, and provide a more reliable theoretical approach than the conventional ΔSCF-DFT method.