The knowledge of the coordination environment around various atomic species in many functional materials provides a key for explaining their properties and working mechanisms. Many structural motifs and their transformations are difficult to detect and quantify in the process of work (operando conditions), due to their local nature, small changes, low dimensionality of the material, and/or extreme conditions. Here we use an artificial neural network approach to extract the information on the local structure and its in situ changes directly from the x-ray absorption fine structure spectra. We illustrate this capability by extracting the radial distribution function (RDF) of atoms in ferritic and austenitic phases of bulk iron across the temperature-induced transition. Integration of RDFs allows us to quantify the changes in the iron coordination and material density, and to observe the transition from a body-centered to a face-centered cubic arrangement of iron atoms. This method is attractive for a broad range of materials and experimental conditions.

Nanocrystalline NiO samples have been studied using the Ni K-edge extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy and recently developed modeling technique, combining classical molecular dynamics with ab initio multiple-scattering EXAFS calculations (MD-EXAFS). Conventional analysis of the EXAFS signals from the first two coordination shells of nickel revealed that (i) the second shell average distance R(Ni-Ni2) expands in nanocrystalline NiO compared to microcrystalline NiO, in agreement with overall unit cell volume expansion observed by x-ray diffraction; (ii) on the contrary, the first shell average distance R(Ni-O1) in nanocrystalline NiO shrinks compared to microcrystalline NiO; (iii) the thermal contribution into the mean-square relative displacement σ 2 is close in both microcrystalline and nanocrystalline NiO and can be described by the Debye model; (iv) the static disorder is additionally present in nanocrystalline NiO in both the first Ni-O1 and second Ni-Ni2 shells due to nanocrystal structure relaxation. Within the MD-EXAFS method, the force-field potential models have been developed for nanosized NiO using as a criterion the agreement between the experimental and theoretical EXAFS spectra. The best solutions have been obtained for the 3D cubic-shaped nanoparticle models with nonzero Ni vacancy concentration Cvac: Cvac ≈ 0.4-1.2% for NiO nanoparticles having the cube size of L ≈ 3.6-4.2 nm and Cvac ≈ 1.6-2.0% for NiO thin film composed of cubic nano-grains with a size of L ≈ 1.3-2.1 nm. Thus, our results show that the Ni vacancies in nanosized NiO play important role in its atomic structure relaxation along with the size reduction effect.

Analysis of atomic structure at the nanoscale is a challenging task, complicated by relaxation phenomena and thermal disorder. In this work, the x-ray absorption spectroscopy at the Ni K-edge was used to address this problem in nanocrystalline NiO (nanoNiO). The expansion of the average lattice but contraction of the Ni-O bonds in the first coordination shell were determined in nano-NiO at 300 K in comparison with bulk material. Accurate EXAFS analysis, based on a combination of classical molecular dynamics and ab initio multiple-scattering EXAFS theory, allowed us to interpret full EXAFS spectrum. In particular, the effect of magnetostriction effect was elucidated in bulk NiO, and the effect of the thermal disorder in outer coordination shells was studied in both bulk and nano-NiO.

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