X-ray absorption near the edge structure and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy studies on pyrite prepared by thermally sulfurizing iron films

This paper reports how pyrite films were prepared by thermalsulfurization of magnetron sputtered iron films and characterized byx-ray absorption near edge structure spectra and x-ray photoelectronspectroscopy on a 4B9B beam line at the Beijing Synchrotron RadiationFacility. The band gap of the pyrite agrees well with the opticalband gap obtained by a spectrophotometer. The octahedral symmetry ofpyrite leads to the splitting of the d orbit into t_{rm 2g} ande_{rm g} levels. The high spin and low spin states were analysedthrough the difference of electron exchange interaction and the orbitalcrystal field. Only when the crystal field splitting is higher than1.5 eV, the two weak peaks above the white lines can appear, and thiswas approved by experiments in the present work.