Spectral Weight of Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering in Doped Cuprates: Effect of Core-Hole Lifetime

We examine the effect of core-hole lifetime on the spectral weight of resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) in hole-doped cuprates. We calculate the spectral weight by using exact diagonalization technique for a 4x4 doped Hubbard lattice and find that spin-flip channel detecting single-magnon excitation is less sensitive to the core-hole lifetime while in non-spin-flip channel the spectral weight is strongly dependent on the lifetime. In the latter, charge and two-magnon excitations predominately contribute to RIXS for short and long core-hole lifetimes, respectively. For a realistic value of the core-hole lifetime in cuprates, both the charge and two-magnon excitations are expected to contribute to non-spin-flip channel in RIXS when the incident-photon energy is tuned to the main peak of x-ray absorption spectrum.