Reaction cell for in situ soft x-ray absorption spectroscopy and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering measurements of heterogeneous catalysis up to 1 atm and 250 °C

We present a novel in situ reaction cell for heterogeneous catalysis monitored in situ by x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). The reaction can be carried out at a total pressure up to 1 atm, a regime that has not been accessible to comparable in situ techniques and thus closes the pressure gap to many industrial standard conditions. Two alternate catalyst geometries were tested: (A) a thin film evaporated directly onto an x-ray transparent membrane with a flowing reaction gas mixture behind it or (B) a powder placed behind both the membrane and a gap of flowing reaction gas mixture. To illustrate the working principle and feasibility of our reaction cell setup we have chosen ethylene epoxidation over a silver catalyst as a test case. The evolution of incorporated oxygen species was monitored by total electron/fluorescence yield O K-XAS as well as O K-RIXS, which is a powerful method to separate contributions from inequivalent sites. We find that our method can reliably detect transient species that exist during catalytic reaction conditions that are hardly accessible using other spectroscopic methods.

Two-spinon and orbital excitations of the spin-Peierls system TiOCl

We combine high-resolution resonant inelastic x-ray scattering with cluster calculations utilizing a recently derived effective magnetic scattering operator to analyze the polarization, excitation energy, and momentum-dependent excitation spectrum of the low-dimensional quantum magnet TiOCl in the range expected for orbital and magnetic excitations (0-2.5 eV). Ti 3d orbital excitations yield complete information on the temperature-dependent crystal-field splitting. In the spin-Peierls phase we observe a dispersive two-spinon excitation and estimate the inter- and intradimer magnetic exchange coupling from a comparison to cluster calculations.