Zeeman-activated Berry curvature magnetotransport from the bulk of non-magnetic metals with inversion symmetry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that non-magnetic metals with inversion symmetry can exhibit Zeeman-activated Berry curvature, leading to negative magnetoresistance, independent of magnetic field strength, due to the non-parabolicity of electronic bands.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of Zeeman-activated Berry curvature in centrosymmetric metals, revealing a new mechanism for negative magnetoresistance unrelated to magnetic ordering.

Findings

Zeeman coupling induces Berry curvature in non-magnetic, inversion-symmetric metals.

The effect causes negative longitudinal magnetoresistance scaling with relaxation time.

This phenomenon is universal across all centrosymmetric point groups.

Abstract

The Berry curvature (BC), a quantity encoding the geometry of electronic wavefunctions, governs various electronic transport effects in quantum materials. In magnetic systems, the BC is reponsible for the intrinsic part of the anomalous Hall conductivity. Local concentrations of BC in non-centrosymmetric materials can lead instead to the quantum nonlinear Hall effect. Here, we argue that the bulk of non-magnetic metals with inversion symmetry, systems where the BC is forced to vanish at any momentum, can be endowed with substantial concentrations of BC even with an infinitesimally small Zeeman coupling. This Zeeman-activated BC, independent of the magnetic field strength and instead related to the degree of non-parabolicity of the electronic bands, couples to the electronic orbital motion to generate a negative longitudinal magnetoresistance that scales with the relaxation time as the Drude resistivity. We show that the Zeeman-actived BC and the related intrinsic negative magnetoresistivity are generic: they appear in all centrosymmetric point groups and can occur both in topological and conventional conductors.