Anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnets with Gaussian disorder (1309.4979v1)

Abstract: Using the Kubo formalism we derived expressions and implemented the method for calculating the anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) in ferromagnets with short-range Gaussian disorder directly from first-principles electronic structure of the perfect crystal. We used this method to calculate the AHC in bcc Fe, fcc Co, L1o-FePd, L1o-FePt as well as thin bcc Fe(001) films. Within our approach we can transparently decompose the conductivity into intrinsic (IC), side jump (SJ) and intrinsic skew-scattering (ISK) contributions. The existence of ISK, which originates from asymmetric Mott scattering but is clearly distinguishable from conventional skew-scattering in that it converges to a finite value in clean limit, was pointed out by Sinitsyn et al. [Phys. Rev. B 75, 045315 (2007)]. Here, we collect all contributions to the AHC in ferromagnets which result in "scattering-independent" AHE in clean limit, and analyze their relative magnitude from first principles calculations. By comparing our results to existing experiments we show that the Gaussian disorder is well suited to model various types of disorder present in real materials, to some extent including the effect of temperature. In particular, we show that in addition to intrinsic and side-jump AHE, the intrinsic skew-scattering can be a major player in determining the magnitude of the AHE in ferromagnets.