Beyond the electric-dipole approximation in simulations of X-ray absorption spectroscopy: Lessons from relativistic theory

Abstract: We present three schemes to go beyond the electric-dipole approximation in X-ray absorption spectroscopy calculations within a four-component relativistic framework. The first is based on the full semi-classical light-matter interaction operator, and the two others on a truncated interaction within Coulomb gauge (velocity representation) and multipolar gauge (length representation). We generalize the derivation of multipolar gauge to an arbitrary expansion point and show that the potentials corresponding to different expansion point are related by a gauge transformation, provided the expansion is not truncated. This suggests that the observed gauge-origin dependence in multipolar gauge is more than just a finite-basis set effect. The simplicity of the relativistic formalism enables arbitrary-order implementations of the truncated interactions, with and without rotational averaging, allowing us to test their convergence behavior numerically by comparison to the full formulation. We confirm the observation that the oscillator strength of the electric-dipole allowed ligand K-edge transition of TiCl$_4$, when calculated to second order in the wave vector, become negative, but also show that inclusion of higher-order contributions allows convergence to the result obtained using the full light-matter interaction. However, at higher energies, the slow convergence of such expansions becomes dramatic and renders such approaches at best impractical. When going beyond the electric-dipole approximation, we therefore recommend the use of the full light-matter interaction.