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.
•Future Technologies

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.

Tuning chirality amplitude at ultrafast timescales in chiral CsCuCl3
•Future Technologies

Tuning chirality amplitude at ultrafast timescales in chiral CsCuCl3

Materials research

We quantify “how chiral” a crystal is, and demonstrate its tunability at ultrafast timescales. This achievement does open up a new direction in chirality-related condensed matter physics and on emergent phenomena, which have both attracted significant attention recently.

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