An indirect probe of the possible half-metallic nature of LiFePO4 using resonant inelastic X-ray scattering

The Fe site in LiFePO4 was probed resonantly and non-resonantly at the L2,3 edge. A suspected half-metal, the experimental results were compared to band structure calculations to understand the electronic structure. We found that the probability of promoting an electron to the unoccupied band through simple photoexcitation or through scattering is highly influenced by magnon-exciton coupling. We have also found evidence that the correlation self-energy has a momentum-dependant component, causing spectral renormalization of the Fe 3d PDOS. Our experimental results are consistent with the predicted band, structure of LiFePO4.