Low-energy d-d excitations in MnO studied by resonant x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy

Abstract

Resonant soft X-ray emission spectroscopy has been demonstrated to possess interesting abilities for studies of electronic structure in various systems, such as symmetry probing, alignment and polarization dependence, sensitivity to channel interference, etc. In the present abstract the authors focus on the feasibility of resonant soft X-ray emission to probe low energy excitations by means of resonant electronic X-ray Raman scattering. Resonant X-ray emission can be regarded as an inelastic scattering process where a system in the ground state is transferred to a low excited state via a virtual core excitation. The energy closeness to a core excitation of the exciting radiation enhances the (generally) low probability for inelastic scattering at these wavelengths. Therefore soft X-ray emission spectroscopy (in resonant electronic Raman mode) can be used to study low energy d-d excitations in transition metal systems. The involvement of the intermediate core state allows one to use the selection rules of X-ray emission, and the appearance of the elastically scattered line in the spectra provides the reference to the ground state.