The role of band-index-dependent transport relaxation times in anomalous Hall effect

TL;DR

This paper investigates how band-index-dependent transport relaxation times influence the anomalous Hall effect in Rashba-coupled 2DEGs, revealing significant differences from traditional models especially at high Fermi energies and emphasizing the importance of coordinate-shift effects.

Contribution

It introduces a band-index-dependent approach to solving the Boltzmann equation for AHE, improving accuracy over traditional relaxation time approximations in Rashba systems.

Findings

Full solution of SBE differs from traditional $1/\tau$ models at large Fermi energies.

Coordinate-shift effects are more significant with larger Rashba coupling.

Inter-band elastic scattering can produce a side-jump velocity exceeding intra-band contributions.

Abstract

We revisit model calculations of the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) and show that, in isotropic Rashba-coupled two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) with pointlike potential impurities, the full solution of the semiclassical Boltzmann equation (SBE) may differ from the widely-used $1/\tau^{||}$ & $1/\tau^{\perp}$ solution [Phys. Rev. B 68, 165311 (2003)]. Our approach to AHE is analogous to the SBE-based analysis of the anisotropic magnetoresistance leading to an integral equation for the distribution function [Phys. Rev. B 79, 045427 (2009)] but in the present case, we reduce the description to band-index-dependent transport relaxation times. When both Rashba bands are partially occupied, these are determined by solving a system of linear equations. Detailed calculations show that, for intrinsic and hybrid skew scatterings the difference between $1/\tau^{||}$ & $1/\tau^{\perp}$ and the full solution of SBE is notable for large Fermi energies. For coordinate-shift effects, the side-jump velocity acquired in the inter-band elastic scattering process is shown to be more important for larger Rashba coupling and may even exceed the intra-band one for the outer Rashba band. The coordinate-shift contribution to AHE in the considered case notably differs from that in the limit of smooth disorder potential analyzed before.