Relationship between x-ray emission and absorption spectroscopy and the local H-bond environment in water

The connection between specific features in the water X-ray absorption spectrum and X-ray emission spectrum (XES) and the local H-bond coordination is studied based on structures obtained from path-integral molecular dynamics simulations using either the opt-PBE-vdW density functional or the MB-pol force field. Computing the XES spectrum using all molecules in a snapshot results in only one peak in the lone-pair (1b₁) region, while the experiment shows two peaks separated by 0.8-0.9 eV. Different H-bond configurations were classified based on the local structure index (LSI) and a geometrical H-bond cone criterion. We find that tetrahedrally coordinated molecules characterized by high LSI values and two strong donated and two strong accepted H-bonds contribute to the low energy 1b₁ emission peak and to the post-edge region in absorption. Molecules with the asymmetric H-bond environment with one strong accepted H-bond and one strong donated H-bond and low LSI values give rise to the high energy 1b₁ peak in the emission spectrum and mainly contribute to the pre-edge and main-edge in the absorption spectrum. The 1b₁ peak splitting can be increased to 0.62 eV by imposing constraints on the H-bond length, i.e., for very tetrahedral structures short H-bonds (less than 2.68 Å) and for very asymmetric structures elongated H-bonds (longer than 2.8 Å). Such structures are present, but underrepresented, in the simulations which give more of an average of the two extremes.