2025/07/24 by Jared E. Abramson, Abramson, Jared E., Charles A. Cardot +15
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic properties of thin films #Magnetism in coordination complexes #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #X-ray Spectroscopy and Fluorescence Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.18839
openalex publication_date 2025/07/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Polarization dependence has historically seen extensive use in x-ray spectroscopy to determine magnetic and local geometric properties, but more broadly as a way to gain extra sensitivity to electronic structure at the level of individual magnetic orbitals. This is often done in the context of x-ray absorption through techniques like x-ray magnetic circular dichroism or x-ray linear dichroism, but it has seen little application to x-ray emission. Here we explore the information contained in the polarized emission of two 3d transition metal systems across both core-to-core (CtC) and valence-to-core emission (VtC) lines. We demonstrate how the Rowland circle geometry can be used as a spectropolarimeter, and apply it to the x-ray emission spectroscopy of spin-1/2 Cu(II) and spin-0 Ni(II) ions in LiVCuO4 and DyNiC2, respectively. From this we explore how the polarized XES interrogates of the occupied density of states at the valence level, either as a second order effect through Coulomb exchange (CtC x-ray emission) or by direct transitions (VtC x-ray emission). We find that the polarized x-ray emission can provide insights into the valence electron orbital occupation, in much the same way that is achievable with polarized absorption or angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy techniques. Finally, we highlight how the individually polarized dipole emission spectra can be extracted from a linearly independent suite of directed emission spectra, allowing for polarized measurements at high Bragg angle with lower experimental broadening.