Laboratory for Advanced Spectroscopy and X-ray Sources (LSX)

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The PSI Laboratory for Advanced Spectroscopy and X-ray Sources develops X-ray sources and advanced spectroscopic techniques and applies them to study a broad range of complex material systems.

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Sketch of reciprocal space showing regions where opposite-handed chiral phonons exist in LiNbO3, which can be probed by circularly polarized x-ray photons in a resonant inelastic x-ray scattering.
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Chiral phonons in polar LiNbO3

Materials research

Resonant inelastic x-ray scattering reveals that lattice vibrations can be chiral in a polar material, with phonons having opposite handedness depending on their direction in momentum space.

Fig. 1: RIXS investigation of iridate/titanate heterostructures. (a) Representation of (SrIrO3)m(SrTiO3)1 superlattices grown on a (001)-oriented SrTiO3 single-crystal substrate. (b) Phase diagram of the (SrIrO3)m(SrTiO3)1 system, showing the bandwidth-controlled metal-insulator transition that occurs as the confinement increases from m = 3 to m = 2. (c) Intensity map of Ir L3-edge RIXS spectra for the m = 4 sample at T = 20 K, plotted as a function of energy transfer and momentum transfer Q. Two distinct e
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Unravelling the coexistence of insulating and metallic-like excitations in SrIrO₃

A team led by researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI used resonant inelastic X-ray scattering to probe spin and charge fluctuations in atomically engineered SrIrO₃. The results revealed that insulator-like and metallic-like modes can simultaneously emerge in a correlated 5d semimetal, advancing the understanding of “strange metal” behaviour in spin–orbit coupled systems.

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