- Rossi, M;
- Lu, H;
- Nag, A;
- Li, D;
- Osada, M;
- Lee, K;
- Wang, BY;
- Agrestini, S;
- Garcia-Fernandez, M;
- Kas, JJ;
- Chuang, Y-D;
- Shen, ZX;
- Hwang, HY;
- Moritz, B;
- Zhou, Ke-Jin;
- Devereaux, TP;
- Lee, WS
The recent discovery of superconductivity in Nd1-xSrxNiO2 has drawn significant attention in the field. A key open question regards the evolution of the electronic structure with respect to hole doping. Here we exploit x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) to probe the doping-dependent electronic structure of Nd1-xSrxNiO2. Upon doping, a high-energy feature in Ni L3-edge XAS develops in addition to the main absorption peak, while XAS at the O K-, Nd M3- and Nd M5-edge exhibits a much weaker response. This implies that doped holes are mainly introduced into Ni 3d states. By comparing our data to atomic multiplet calculations including D4h crystal field, the doping-induced feature in Ni L3-edge XAS is consistent with a d8 spin-singlet state in which doped holes reside in the 3dx2-y2 orbitals. This is further supported by the softening of RIXS orbital excitations due to doping, corroborating with the Fermi level shift associated with increasing holes in the Ni 3dx2-y2 orbital.