Extrinsic contribution to bosonic thermal Hall transport

TL;DR

This paper develops a kinetic theory for the extrinsic contribution to the bosonic thermal Hall effect, revealing how impurities can significantly influence measurements and interpretations of topological properties in magnetic insulators.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous kinetic framework for the extrinsic side-jump contribution to the bosonic thermal Hall effect, highlighting impurity effects and generalizing electronic anomalous Hall results.

Findings

Extrinsic THE can be comparable to intrinsic THE.

Impurities can induce a thermal Hall effect even when intrinsic contributions vanish.

Impurity types critically affect the magnitude and sign of THE.

Abstract

Bosonic excitations like phonons and magnons dominate the low-temperature transport of magnetic insulators. Similar to electronic Hall responses, the thermal Hall effect (THE) of charge neutral bosons has been proposed as a powerful tool for probing topological properties of their wavefunctions. For example, the intrinsic contribution of the THE of a perfectly clean system is directly governed by the distribution of Berry curvature, and many experiments on topological magnon and phonon insulators have been interpreted in this way. However, disorder is inevitably present in any material and its contribution to the THE has remained poorly understood. Here we develop a rigorous kinetic theory of the extrinsic side-jump contribution to the THE of bosons. We show that the extrinsic THE can be of the same order as the intrinsic one but sensitively depends on the type of local imperfection. We study different types of impurities and show that a THE can even arise as a pure impurity-induced effect in a system with a vanishing intrinsic contribution. As a side product, we also generalize existing results for the electronic AHE to general types of impurities beyond the standard assumption of local potential scattering. We discuss the importance of our results for the correct interpretation of THE measurements.