Probing Electron-Phonon Interactions Away from the Fermi Level with Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering

Interactions between electrons and lattice vibrations are responsible for a wide range of material properties and applications. Recently, there has been considerable interest in the development of resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) as a tool for measuring electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions. Here, we demonstrate the ability of RIXS to probe the interaction between phonons and specific electronic states both near to, and away from, the Fermi level. We perform carbon K-edge RIXS measurements on graphite, tuning the incident x-ray energy to separately probe the interactions of the pi = and sigma* electronic states. Our high-resolution data reveal detailed structure in the multiphonon RIXS features that directly encodes the momentum dependence of the e-ph interaction strength. We develop a Green's-function method to model this structure, which naturally accounts for the phonon and interaction-strength dispersions, as well as the mixing of phonon momenta in the intermediate state. This model shows that the differences between the spectra can be fully explained by contrasting trends of the e-ph interaction through the Brillouin zone, being concentrated at the Gamma and K points for the pi* states while being significant at all momenta for the sigma* states. Our results advance the interpretation of phonon excitations in RIXS and extend its applicability as a probe of e-ph interactions to a new range of out-of-equilibrium situations.