XANES studies of modified and newly synthesized nanostructured manganese oxides

Abstract The interesting chemical and physical properties of Mn-oxide-based nanomaterials offer a variety of technological applications. The novel Mn-oxide properties reached through synthetic design have the potential to be of tremendous contribution to modern, environmental friendly chemistry. A problem of Mn oxide crystal chemistry is that, even within a single mineral, Mn atoms can exhibit multiple valence states. An average oxidation state for Mn atoms can be easily and quite reasonably measured, however, determining the individual proportions/(“weights”) of Mn(IV), Mn(III), and Mn(II) in a non-destructive way is considerably more difficult. We applied X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) to investigate the Mn environment and to improve fundamental understanding of the structural chemistry and morphology of nanostructured Mn-oxides to produce desirable chemical and physical properties.