Demonstration of resonant inelastic x-ray scattering as a probe of exciton-phonon coupling

Resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) is a promising technique for obtaining electron-phonon coupling constants. However, the ability to extract these coupling constants throughout the Brillouin zone for crystalline materials remains limited. To address this need, we developed a Green's function formalism to capture electron-phonon contributions to core-level spectroscopies without explicitly solving the full vibronic problem. Our approach is based on the cumulant expansion of the Green's function combined with many-body theory calculated vibrational coupling constants. The methodology is applied to x-ray photo-emission spectroscopy, x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), and RIXS. In the case of the XAS and RIXS, we use a two-particle exciton Green's function, which accounts implicitly for particle-hole interference effects that have previously proved difficult. To demonstrate the methodology and gain a deeper understanding of the experimental technique, we apply our formalism to small molecules, for which unambiguous experimental data exist. This comparison reveals that the vibronic coupling constant probed by RIXS is in fact related to exciton-phonon coupling rather than electron-phonon coupling, challenging the conventional interpretation of the experiment.