Resonant soft X-ray emission of solids and liquids

Resonant soft X-ray emission spectroscopy (SXES) has become a powerful tool for investigating the electronic structure of a large variety of materials and systems. This is due to the vastly improved performance of third generation high brightness synchrotron radiation sources and soft X-ray emission spectroscopy dedicated beamlines. The experiments presented here were performed at two synchrotron facilities: beamline 7.0.1 at the Advanced Light Source (Berkeley, CA, USA) and bean-line 15-11c at MAXLAB (Lund, Sweden). We show that resonant soft X-ray emission spectroscopy can give valuable information about the electronic structure of highly correlated materials such as cuprates and vanadates. Recently, we have succeeded in constructing soft X-ray window-sealed liquid cell containers for the study of the electronic structure of liquid state samples. Here we present some first results from salt solutions showing how information on the water-ion interaction can be extracted. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.