Abstract
We report on measurements of nonresonant inelastic x-ray scattering (NIXS) to unravel the effective symmetry of Cu orbitals in the ground state of CuO. A clear feature of energy loss at about 2 eV exists in the NIXS spectrum, arising from excitations; the intensities of these excitations display a pronounced anisotropy. The comparison between the measured angular distributions of scattering and those from theoretical predictions by the tesseral harmonics indicates that, in terms of a hole picture, the lowest-energy excitation is the orbital transition . In addition, the transition has an energy higher than , in contrast to a previous interpretation. Our results imply a large Jahn-Teller-like splitting between and orbitals. The theory assuming a symmetry explains the angular dependence of the NIXS spectra fairly well, implying that this symmetry is a reasonable approximation. This demonstrates that NIXS can provide important information for modeling of the electronic structure of ions embedded in a complicated crystal field.
1 More- Received 13 September 2013
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.88.205129
©2013 American Physical Society