How disorder affects the Berry-phase anomalous Hall conductivity: A reciprocal-space analysis

Abstract

The anomalous Hall conductivity of "dirty" ferromagnetic metals is dominated by a Berry-phase contribution which is usually interpreted as an intrinsic property of the Bloch electrons in the pristine crystal. In this work we evaluate the geometric Hall current directly from the electronic ground state with disorder, and then recast it as an integral over the crystalline Brillouin zone. The integrand is a generalized k-space Berry curvature, obtained by unfolding the Berry curvature from the small Brillouin zone of a large supercell. Therein, disorder yields a net extrinsic Hall contribution, which we argue is related to the elusive side-jump effect. As an example, we unfold the first-principles Berry curvature of an Fe3Co ordered alloy from the original fcc-lattice Brillouin zone onto a bcc-lattice zone with four times the volume. Comparison with the virtual-crystal Berry curvature clearly reveals the symmetry-breaking effects of the substitutional Co atoms.