Extracting paramagnon excitations from resonant inelastic x-ray scattering experiments

Resonant x-ray scattering experiments on high-temperature superconductors and related cuprates have revealed the presence of intense paramagnon scattering at high excitation energies, of the order of several hundred meV. The excitation energies appear to show very similar behavior across all compounds, ranging from magnetically ordered, via superconductors, to heavy fermion systems. However, we argue that this apparent behavior has been inferred from the data through model fitting which implicitly imposes such similarities. Using model fitting that is free from such restrictions, we show that the paramagnons are not nearly as well defined as has been asserted previously, and that some paramagnons might not represent propagating excitations at all. Our work indicates that the data published previously in the literature will need to be reanalyzed with proper models.