We report a study on the temperature dependence of the charge-neutral crystal field (dd) excitations in cupric oxide, using nonresonant inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS) spectroscopy. Thanks to a very high energy resolution (60 meV), we observe thermal effects on the dd excitation spectrum fine structure between temperatures of 10-320 K. With an increasing temperature, the spectra broaden considerably. We assign the temperature dependence of the dd excitations to the relatively large electron-phonon coupling.
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