Anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic semiconductors in the hopping transport regime.

Abstract

We present a theory of the anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As in the regime when conduction is due to phonon-assisted hopping of holes between localized states in the impurity band. We show that the microscopic origin of the anomalous Hall conductivity in this system can be attributed to a phase that a hole gains when hopping around closed-loop paths in the presence of spin-orbit interactions and background magnetization of the localized Mn moments. Mapping the problem to a random resistor network, we derive an analytic expression for the macroscopic anomalous Hall conductivity sigma(AH)(xy). We show that sigma(AH)(xy) is proportional to the first derivative of the density of states varrho(epsilon) and thus can be expected to change sign as a function of impurity band filling. We also show that sigma(AH)(xy) depends on temperature as the longitudinal conductivity sigma(xx) within logarithmic accuracy.