Experimental signatures of phase interference and sub-femtosecond time dynamics on the incident energy axis of resonant inelastic X-ray scattering

Abstract

Core hole resonance is used in X-ray spectroscopy to incisively probe the local electronic states of many-body systems. Here, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) is studied as a function of incident photon energy on Mott insulators SrCuO2 and NiO to examine how resonance states decay into different excitation symmetries at the transition metal M-, L- and K-edges. Quantum interference patterns characteristic of the two major RIXS mechanisms are identified within the data, and used to distinguish the attosecond scale scattering dynamics by which fundamental excitations of a many-body system are created. A function is proposed to experimentally evaluate whether a particular excitation has constructive or destructive interference in the RIXS cross-section, and corroborates other evidence that an anomalous excitation is present at the leading edge of the Mott gap in quasi-one dimensional SrCuO2.

12 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Spin-Orbital Separation in the quasi 1D Mott-insulator Sr2CuO3
• Spin excitations in a single La${}_2$CuO${}_4$ layer
• Momentum Dependence of Charge Excitations in the Electron-Doped Superconductor Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4: a RIXS Study
• Ultrashort Lifetime Expansion for Indirect Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering
• Correlated band structure of NiO, CoO and MnO by variational cluster approximation
• Anisotropic softening of collective charge modes in the vicinity of critical doping in a doped Mott insulator
• Lattice coupling and Franck-Condon effects in K-edge resonant inelastic X-ray scattering
• Multiplet resonance lifetimes in resonant inelastic X-ray scattering involving shallow core levels
• Microscopic theory of resonant soft x-ray scattering in systems with charge order

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Resonant inelastic x-ray incarnation of Young's double-slit experiment
• Charge transfer excitations in VUV and soft X-ray resonant scattering spectroscopies
• Irreversible proliferation of magnetic moments at cleaved surfaces of the topological Kondo insulator SmB6
• Precise dd excitations and commensurate intersite Coulomb interactions in the dissimilar cuprate YBa_2Cu_3O_(7-x) and La_(2-x)Sr_xCuO_4
• High resolution resonant inelastic EUV scattering from orbital excitations in a Heisenberg antiferromagnet