Effects of Low-Energy Excitations on Spectral Properties at Higher Binding Energy: The Metal-Insulator Transition of VO2

The effects of electron interaction on spectral properties can be understood in terms of coupling between excitations. In transition-metal oxides, the spectral function close to the Fermi level and low-energy excitations between d states have attracted particular attention. In this work we focus on photoemission spectra of vanadium dioxide over a wide (10 eV) range of binding energies. We show that there are clear signatures of the metal-insulator transition over the whole range due to a cross coupling of the delocalized s and p states with low-energy excitations between the localized d states. This coupling can be understood by advanced calculations based on many-body perturbation theory in the GW approximation. We also advocate the fact that tuning the photon energy up to the hard-x-ray range can help to distinguish fingerprints of correlation from pure band-structure effects.