Post-doctoral Position – (m/f) – Resonant Inelastic X-ray spectroscopy at SEXTANTS (SOLEIL)
Position opens in September 2014. Deadline for submission of application: June 25, 2014
SEXTANTS is a new beamline conceived for the investigation of electronic and magnetic properties of matter through elastic, inelastic and coherent scattering of soft X-ray photons, open to external users since March 2011. The full energy range, from 50 to 1700 eV, is covered by two Apple-II undulators providing full polarization control, and by a fixed-deviation monochromator based on five plane gratings and one spherical mirror. The monochromator feeds two independent branches; one is dedicated to elastic (magnetic, coherent) X-ray scattering experiments, the other to resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) experiments. This latter branch, characterized by an extremely small monochromatic beam (2×80 μm2 FWHM) and equipped with the AERHA spectrometer, is devoted to high-resolution RIXS experiments over the 50-1000 eV energy range, with a resolving power up to 8000. The AERHA spectrometer, developed jointly by the “Laboratoire de Chimie-Physique Matière et Rayonnement” and SOLEIL, is based on an elliptical mirror, focusing on a 13.5 μm pixel LN-cooled CCD, and on two VLS gratings, used to cover the entire energy range. It is important to remark that the high brilliance/resolution together with the wide energy range accessible for RIXS experiments at SEXTANTS, extending from L- to M-edges of light transition metal compounds, and including oxygen and carbon K edges, makes this experimental setup not only suitable for study of the low-energy electronic and magnetic excitations in highly correlated materials (e.g., transition-metal oxides and rare-earth compounds), but also a unique place where to investigate organic compounds/molecules deposited on solids or in gaseous/liquid solutions.