Signatures of diradicals in x-ray absorption spectroscopy

Theoretical simulations are critical to analyze and interpret the x-ray absorption spectrum of transient open-shell species. In this work, we propose a model of the many-body core-excited states of symmetric diradicals. We apply this model to analyze the carbon K-edge transitions of o-, m-, and p-benzyne, three organic diradicals with diverse and unusual electronic structures. The predictions of our model are compared with high-level multireference computations of the K-edge spectrum of the benzynes obtained with the driven similarity renormalization group truncated to third order. Our model shows the importance of a many-body treatment of the core-excited states of the benzynes and provides a theoretical framework to understand which properties of the ground state of these diradicals can be extracted from their x-ray spectrum.