Experimental signatures of phase interference and sub-femtosecond time   dynamics on the incident energy axis of resonant inelastic X-ray scattering
  Core hole resonance is used in X-ray spectroscopy to incisively probe the local electronic states of many-body systems. Here, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) is studied as a function of incident photon energy on Mott insulators SrCuO2 and NiO to examine how resonance states decay into different excitation symmetries at the transition metal M-, L- and K-edges. Quantum interference patterns characteristic of the two major RIXS mechanisms are identified within the data, and used to distinguish the attosecond scale scattering dynamics by which fundamental excitations of a many-body system are created. A function is proposed to experimentally evaluate whether a particular excitation has constructive or destructive interference in the RIXS cross-section, and corroborates other evidence that an anomalous excitation is present at the leading edge of the Mott gap in quasi-one dimensional SrCuO2. 
L. Andrew Wray, Shih-Wen Huang, Yuqi Xia, M. Zahid Hasan, Charles   Mathy, Hiroshi Eisaki, Zahid Hussain, and Yi-De Chuang
cond-mat.str-el