RESONANT X-RAY SCATTERING AS A PROBE OF ORBITAL AND CHARGE ORDERING. (open access)

RESONANT X-RAY SCATTERING AS A PROBE OF ORBITAL AND CHARGE ORDERING.

Resonant x-ray scattering is a powerful experimental technique for probing orbital and charge ordering. It involves tuning the incident photon energy to an absorption edge of the relevant ion and observing scattering at previously ''forbidden'' Bragg peaks, and it allows high-resolution, quantitative studies of orbital and charge order--even from small samples. Further, resonant x-ray scattering from orbitally ordered systems exhibits polarization- and azimuthal-dependent properties that provide additional information about the details of the orbital order that is difficult, or impossible, to obtain with any other technique. In the manganites, the sensitivity to charge and orbital ordering is enhanced when the incident photon energy is tuned near the Mn K absorption edge (6.539 keV), which is the lowest energy at which a 1s electron can be excited into an unoccupied state. In this process, the core electron is promoted to an intermediate excited state, which decays with the emission of a photon. The sensitivity to charge ordering is believed to be due to the small difference in K absorption edges of the Mn{sup 3+} and Mn{sup 4+} sites. For orbital ordering, the sensitivity arises from a splitting--or difference in the weight of the density of states [239]--of the orbitals occupied by …
Date: May 13, 2002
Creator: Nelson, C. S.; Hill, J. P. & Gibbs, D.
System: The UNT Digital Library