Chemical Behavior of Sulfur in Minerals and Silicate Glasses Studied Using Inner Shell Spectroscopy

Understanding the chemical behaviour of sulfur is of fundamental importance in explaining different geological mechanisms ranging from volcano-climatic interactions to the genesis of ore deposits. Understanding how sulphur behaves is also of great economic importance in industrial activities including glass-forming processes and the treatment of vitreous waste material from refuse incineration. The chemical behaviour of sulfur in minerals and glasses has been widely studied via X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy, which probes the unoccupied density of states and thus provides information on the oxidation state and local structure of the species under study. However, the XANES spectral shape is influenced by various effects, namely the local symmetry, the ligand type, even up to high coordination spheres, and the valence electron occupation, making it difficult to systematically analyze the different spectral contributions. We use X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) as a complementary technique to avoid some of the inherent difficulties of XANES analysis, and to extract additional information on the electronic structure. The Kb lines, close to the K-edge, directly yield the p-density of occupied valence states, giving valuable information on the local coordination. We have compared XANES and Kb XES experimental data on sulfur- bearing minerals with ab initio quantum-chemical calculations based on density functional theory (DFT), in order to visualize the molecular orbitals and to extract information about the chemical bonding in these compounds. The S Ka emission lines, which arise from 2p to 1s transitions, are expected to be mostly free from chemical bond effects except for small energy shifts that reflect the valence orbital electron population via screening effects. S Ka shifts can be readily used to determine the speciation of sulfur in silicate glasses. The electronic configuration of the sulfur atoms is obtained by calculating the effective charge around the sulfur atom based on the Mulliken population analysis generated by DFT calculations, and then successfully correlated with the observed experimental shifts. In order to check these results using a theoretical framework other than DFT, we also performed calculations using a multiple scattering approach (FEFF8.4). X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy has been applied to three series of peralkaline rhyolitic obsidians each with different alkali/alumina ratios ((Na2O + K2O)/Al2O3). The occurrence of sulfur was accurately determined by using the energy shift of the S Ka emission lines to make a quantitative analysis. We observe that we can follow the evolution of sulfur as a function of controlled formation conditions with respect to pressure, temperature or oxygen fugacity, and determine whether it is present as sulfate or sulfide. XANES and Kb emission lines also yield detailed information on the local chemistry and structure, and thus help us to understand the geochemical role of S in these systems.