Abstract
We determine how the elementary excitations of iridium-oxide materials, which are dominated by a strong relativistic spin-orbit coupling, appear in resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). Whereas the RIXS spectral weight at the x-ray edge vanishes in the limit of cubic symmetry, we find it to be strong at the edge. Applying this to SrIrO, we observe that RIXS, besides being sensitive to local doublet-to-quartet transitions, meticulously maps out the strongly dispersive delocalized excitations of the low-lying spin-orbit doublets.
- Received 28 August 2010
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.84.020403
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