ELNES spectroscopy of mixed Si coordination minerals

Abstract

 Si K- and L-edge ELNES spectroscopy and multiple-scattering (MS) calculations are used to examine mixed Si coordination compounds varying in Si^VI:Si^IV ratio. As in previous studies, the edges are influenced mainly by silicon coordination (tetrahedral vs. octahedral), as supported by the MS calculations. We demonstrate two methods semi-quantitatively to extract the value of Si^VI/(Si^VI+Si^IV): (1) A linear relationship between the L_2,3-L₁ splitting and Si^VI/(Si^VI+Si^IV) is observed, (2) a fitting method based on the coaddition of reference tetrahedral and octahedral Si spectra is applied to both Si K- and L-edge ELNES spectra.