Theory of unidirectional magnetoresistance and nonlinear Hall effect

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding unidirectional magnetoresistance and nonlinear Hall effects in ferromagnetic Rashba systems, comparing formalisms and analyzing their dependencies and magnitudes.

Contribution

It derives and compares Keldysh and Moyal-Keldysh formalisms for nonlinear conductivities in ferromagnetic Rashba models, revealing their equivalence and differences with Boltzmann results.

Findings

UMR and NLHE conductivities are comparable in magnitude.

Both formalisms yield identical numerical results for the model.

Nonlinear response is significantly higher than optical frequency photocurrents.

Abstract

We study the unidirectional magnetoresistance (UMR) and the nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE) in the ferromagnetic Rashba model. For this purpose we derive expressions to describe the response of the electric current quadratic in the applied electric field. We compare two different formalisms, namely the standard Keldysh nonequilibrium formalism and the Moyal-Keldysh formalism, to derive the nonlinear conductivities of UMR and NLHE. We find that both formalisms lead to identical numerical results when applied to the ferromagnetic Rashba model. The UMR and the NLHE nonlinear conductivities tend to be comparable in magnitude according to our calculations. Additionally, their dependencies on the Rashba parameter and on the quasiparticle broadening are similar. The nonlinear zero-frequency response considered here is several orders of magnitude higher than the one at optical frequencies that describes the photocurrent generation in the ferromagnetic Rashba model. Additionally, we compare our Keldysh nonequilibrium expression in the independent-particle approximation to literature expressions of the UMR that have been obtained within the constant relaxation time approximation of the Boltzmann formalism. We find that both formalisms converge to the same analytical formula in the limit of infinite relaxation time. However, remarkably, we find that the Boltzmann result does not correspond to the intraband term of the Keldysh expression. Instead, the Boltzmann result corresponds to the sum of the intraband term and an interband term that can be brought into the form of an effective intraband term due to the f-sum rule.