Reply to Comment on 'Resonant inelastic x-ray scattering of MnO:: L2,3 edge measurements and assessment of their interpretation'

In their Comment to our recent paper [Phys. Rev. B 73, 035111 (2006)], Muller and Hufner proposed a comparison of our Mn L(2),(3) resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) data with low-energy electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) measurements. The differences in the experimental spectra highlighted by the authors can be easily ascribed to the different cross sections in the two techniques, even when they probe the same subset of excited states, namely, the dd excitations. One important difference is that EELS is limited to quartet final states only, whereas RIXS can lead to doublets, too. Thus our theoretical interpretation of the RIXS spectra, made within two different models, is compatible with the traditional crystal-field analysis of EELS. As the Sugano-Tanabe diagram usually do not include the 3d spin-orbit and the interatomic superexchange interactions, their accuracy is limited to hundreds of meV and they should be utilized only for rough assignments of the spectral features. On the contrary, by calculating the RIXS spectral shape we could address more sophisticated models with remarkable agreement to the experimental results. This is hardly possible in the case of low-energy EELS, for which reliable simulations of the spectra are much more difficult.