Noncommutative quantum mechanics and skew scattering in ferromagnetic metals

Abstract

The anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic metals is classified into two based on the mechanism. The first one is the intrinsic Hall effect due to the Berry curvature in momentum space; this is a Hall effect that solely arises from the band structure of solids. On the other hand, another contribution to the Hall effect, so-called extrinsic mechanism, comes from impurity scatterings such as skew scattering and side jump; for the extrinsic mechanism, the spin-orbit interaction of the impurity ions is often required. These two mechanisms are often discussed separately; the intrinsic Hall effect is dominant in the intermediate resistivity region while the latter, i.e., skew scattering, becomes important in the clean limit. In this work, it is shown theoretically that the non-commutative nature of the real-space coordinates in the presence of the Berry curvature causes the skew scattering by the nonmagnetic impurity without relativistic spin-orbit interactions, in sharp contrast to the conventional cases.