- He, Haowei;
- Gray, AX;
- Granitzka, P;
- Jeong, JW;
- Aetukuri, NP;
- Kukreja, R;
- Miao, Lin;
- Breitweiser, S Alexander;
- Wu, Jinpeng;
- Huang, YB;
- Olalde-Velasco, P;
- Pelliciari, J;
- Schlotter, WF;
- Arenholz, E;
- Schmitt, T;
- Samant, MG;
- Parkin, SSP;
- Dürr, HA;
- Wray, L Andrew
Vanadium dioxide is of broad interest as a spin-12 electron system that realizes a metal-insulator transition near room temperature, due to a combination of strongly correlated and itinerant electron physics. Here, resonant inelastic x-ray scattering is used to measure the excitation spectrum of charge and spin degrees of freedom at the vanadium L edge under different polarization and temperature conditions, revealing excitations that differ greatly from those seen in optical measurements. These spectra encode the evolution of short-range energetics across the metal-insulator transition, including the low-temperature appearance of a strong candidate for the singlet-triplet excitation of a vanadium dimer.