Dear all, Thanks million for your great advice for my EXAFS modeling! It helps me understand more about EXAFS and I really appreciate it! But I still have some questions to consult you. I took your suggestion and have the amp and e0 the same for each path. In addition, I fixed the number axial U-O as 2. For the equatorial ligand, since the total coordination number is between 4 and 6, I guess the number of U-F as 2(that is n1), and def the number of U-O as (5-n1)(that is n2). Then I did the fit. The result showed the ss_2 is still negative. So I set the ss_2 as 0.003, did the fitting again. I don't know if it is ok to fix the ss_2=0.003. It seems the dr_1 change a lot. In addition, I tried to do fitting in Kw=2 in stead of Kw=3. At this time, the ss_2 is positive, and from my understanding, it seems the modeling is more resonable for dr_1 and dr_2, but the R-factor is 0.023, a little bit larger than 0.02. How can I decide which one I should use, the Kw=3 or Kw=2? Is there anything I can do to improve the modeling? The attached is my modeling. I am sorry to put attachment in the email that my bother you. Best regards! Hao
Hao,
A few more comments:
1. It is well advised for anyone starting to look at uranyl compounds with XAS to read Shelly's various publications on that topic. Geochem. Cosmo. Acta, 66(22) 3875-3891, (2002) is particularly useful. Google scholar can help you locate more of her papers.
2. I am the first to admit that Artemis and Ifeffit are difficult tools for the beginning exafs practitioner. These tools try to provide a usable face to a difficult problem. Ifeffit was written with enough flexibility and power to allow the so-called experts to do the analysis they want to do. That means that Artemis has enough freedom to allow the unsuspecting user to do ill-advised things.
You really need to think about what each of the parameters means. For example, just because Artemis allows you to float e0 freely for each path does not mean that doing so is a good idea. There are situations where it is a very good idea to have more than one e0 parameter in your fit, but I suspect that yours is not one of them. Consequently, you should consider constraining all your paths to have the same e0.
What do I mean by "constrain"? Well, on the Guess,Def,Set page, you can define a single e0 parameter as a guess parameter, then use that parameter on each of the path pages. In that way, you will have one floating parameter in your fit that is used to describe the e0 of all your parameters.
Similarly, you should think hard about the numbers of each kind of path. A uranyl moiety is unlikely to have more or less than 2 uranyl ligands. The uranyl bond is very strong, consequently it is energetically unfavorable in a uranyl for those two bonds to be over- or under-filled. Consequently, you can consider setting the number of yl oxygens to 2. Furthermore, the equatorial plane is likely to have between 4 and 6 oxygens, so you should think of ways to constrain the total number of equatorial oxygens to be something reasonable. Since the coordination number is highly correlated with sigma^2 in a statistical sense, thinking well about coordination number should help address your original question.
3. Scott has made a very nice Artemis tutorial which can be found at http://cars9.uchicago.edu/iffwiki/HoraeSoftware#contrib It comes in the form of a series of Artemis projects. Newcomers benefit by working through his tutorial before trying to analyse their own data with Artemis.
4. The Ifeffit web site, my home page, and especialy http://xafs.org are all filled with useful information for the XAS novice. If you haven't already looked through the resources on those sites, you really should budget some time to do so.
HTH, B
-- Bruce Ravel ---------------------------------------------- bravel@anl.gov
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