We study the effect of oxygen vacancies on the electronic structure of the model strongly correlated metal SrVO3. By means of angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) synchrotron experiments, we investigate the systematic effect of the UV dose on the measured spectra. We observe the onset of a spurious dose-dependent prominent peak at an energy range were the lower Hubbard band has been previously reported in this compound, raising questions on its previous interpretation. By a careful analysis of the dose dependent effects we succeed in disentangling the contributions coming from the oxygen vacancy states and from the lower Hubbard band. We obtain the intrinsic ARPES spectrum for the zero-vacancy limit, where a clear signal of a lower Hubbard band remains. We support our study by means of state-of-the-art ab initio calculations that include correlation effects and the presence of oxygen vacancies. Our results underscore the relevance of potential spurious states affecting ARPES experiments in correlated metals, which are associated to the ubiquitous oxygen vacancies as extensively reported in the context of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) at the surface of insulating d 0 transition metal oxides. A major challenge of modern physics is to understand the fascinating phenomena in strongly-correlated transition metal oxides (TMOs), which emerge in the neighborhood of the Mott insulator state. Some preeminent examples that have gathered the interest for almost 30 years are high temperature superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance, heavy fermion physics and, of course, the Mott metal-insulator transition itself [1]. Significant theoretical progress was made with the introduction of Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT) and its combination with ab initio Density Functional methods (LDA+DMFT), which allows treatment of the interactions promoting itinerancy and localization of electrons on equal footing [2][3][4]. Among the most emblematic achievements of DMFT is the prediction of a Hubbard satellite, which splits off of the conduction band of a metal. This satellite results from the partial localization of conduction electrons due to their mutual Coulomb repulsion. Early DMFT studies also showed that it is the precursor of the localized electronic states of a Mott insulator [5]. Since then, these predictions promoted a large number of studies using photoemission spectroscopy, which is a technique to directly probe the presence of Hubbard bands. In this context, the TMO system SrVO 3 has emerged as the drosophila model system to test the predictions of strongly correlated electron theories. In fact, SrVO 3 is arguably the simplest correlated metal. It is a simple cubic perovskite, with nominally one electron per V site, which occupies a 3 fold degenerate t 2g conduction band. While the presence of a satellite in the photoemission spectra of Ni metal was already well known, in the context of correlated TMOs, the Hubbard band was originally reported in a systematic investigation of Ca 1−x Sr x VO 3 [6], which was follo...
