Empirical relationship between x-ray photoemission spectra and electrical conductivity in a colossal magnetoresistive manganite La1-xSrxMnO3

By using laboratory x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) and hard x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (HX-PES) at a synchrotron facility, we report an empirical semi-quantitative relationship between the valence/core-level x-ray photoemission spectral weight and electrical conductivity in La1-xSrxMnO3 as a function of x. In the Mn 2p(3/2) HX-PES spectra, we observed the shoulder structure due to the Mn3+ well-screened state. However, the intensity at x = 0.8 was too small to explain its higher electrical conductivity than x = 0.0, which confirms our recent analysis on the Mn 2p(3/2) XPS spectra. The near-Fermi level XPS spectral weight was found to be a measure of the variation of electrical conductivity with x in spite of a far lower energy resolution compared with the energy scale of the quasiparticle (coherent) peak because of the concurrent change of the coherent and incoherent spectral weight. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.