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We report initial results of a systematic study of the calculation of near-edge features in the x-ray absorption spectra of an atom in a molecular cluster as a function of different chemical environments and of varying prescriptions for the effective molecular potential of the excited electron. For a test-case comparison of the K edges of Ge Cl 4 and Ge H 4, we find that the chemically induced changes in the molecular potential lead to large changes in the occurrence and strengths of bound-state and shape-resonance spectral features, in semiquantitative agreement with observation.