SPring-8, the large synchrotron radiation facility

A research group led by Shigenori Ueda (Researcher) and his colleagues at the NIMS Beamline Station at SPring-8 (Station Leader, Osami Sakata), part of the Research Network and Facility Services Division of NIMS (President, Sukekatsu Ushioda), has succeeded in measuring the true band dispersion of solids by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) in the hard X-ray region for the first time in the world. This was realized using SPring-8 equipment for performing hard X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, which enables the measurement of the electron state inside a solid with the highest resolution in the world, and a theoretical method called first-principles calculation. The systems targeted were tungsten (W), a typical metal, and gallium arsenide (GaAs), a typical semiconductor.

This research was jointly carried out with the University of California Davis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Research Center Jülich, and Ludwig Maximillian University. The achievement of this study is expected to enable the electronic band structure of various functional materials to be measured and provide a means of creating new functional materials.

The results were published online in Nature Materials, published by the Nature Publishing Group, on 15 August 2011.

Publication:
"Probing bulk electronic structure with hard X-ray angle-resolved photoemission"
A. X. Gray, C. Papp, S. Ueda, B. Balke, Y. Yamashita, L. Plucinski, J. Minár, J. Braun, E. R. Ylvisaker, C. M. Schneider, W. E. Pickett, H. Ebert, K. Kobayashi and C. S. Fadley
Nature Materials (2011), published online 14 August 2011