The role of spin-orbit coupling in the electronic structure of IrO$_2$

Understand

The delicate interplay of electronic charge, spin, and orbital degrees of freedom is in the heart of many novel phenomena across the transition metal oxide family.

• Here, by combining high- resolution angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and first principles calculations (with and without spin-orbit coupling), the electronic structure of the rutile binary iridate, IrO$_2$ is investigated.
• The detailed study of electronic bands measured on a high-quality single crystalline sample, and use of a wide range of photon energy provide a huge improvement over the previous studies.
• The excellent agreement between theory and experimental results shows that the single-particle DFT description of IrO$_2$ band structure is adequate, without the need of invoking any treatment of correlation effects.