Phonon Thermal Hall Conductivity from Scattering with Collective Fluctuations

Kavli Affiliate: Leon Balents

| First 5 Authors: Léo Mangeolle, Leon Balents, Lucile Savary, ,

| Summary:

Because electrons and ions form a coupled system, it is a priori clear that
the dynamics of the lattice should reflect symmetry breaking within the
electronic degrees of freedom. This has been recently clearly evidenced for the
case of time-reversal and mirror symmetry breakings by observations of a large
phononic thermal Hall effect in many strongly correlated electronic materials.
The mechanism by which time-reversal breaking and chirality is communicated to
the lattice is, however, far from evident. In this paper we discuss how this
occurs via many-body scattering of phonons by collective modes: a consequence
of non-Gaussian correlations of the latter modes. We derive fundamental new
results for such skew (i.e. chiral) scattering and the consequent thermal Hall
conductivity. From this we also obtain general formulae for these quantities
for ordered antiferromagnets. From the latter we obtain the scaling behavior of
the phonon thermal Hall effect in clean antiferromagnets. The calculations show
several different regimes and give quantitative estimates of similar order to
that seen in recent experiments.

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