Two polarization dependent Auger decays observed by resonant photoelectron spectroscopy at the Cu2p-edge of superconducting BiSrCu-oxides

We report on a resonant photoemission (resPES) study of PbxBi2−xSr2−yLayCan−1CunO2n+4+δ (BISCO) single crystals to unravel the resonant decay mechanisms at the Cu2p absorption edge. The resPES studies on superconducting BISCO are performed at Bessy U49/2. We investigated BISCO single crystals with different hole doping concentrations at temperatures between 300 K and 17 K. CuO films have been used as a reference. We focus on the resPES data recorded at the Cu2p absorption edge. We find a strong polarization dependence for in-plane and out-of-plane geometries (with respect to the Cu-O plane) in our data which are caused by two independent Auger processes. We also report on the influence of different doping concentrations. Our resPES data enable us to sort the individual resonant mechanisms at the Cu2p edge in more detail than recently anticipated (Brookes et al., 2015). We discuss our data in the context of the recent discussion about the applicability of the Zhang-Rice model (Chen et al., 2013).