Unified theory of the anomalous and topological Hall effects with phase-space Berry curvatures

Abstract

Spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry in magnetic materials leads to a Hall response, with a nonzero voltage transverse to an applied current, even in the absence of external magnetic fields. It is common to analyze the Hall resistivity of chiral magnets as the sum of two terms: an anomalous Hall effect arising from spin-orbit coupling and a topological Hall signal coming from skyrmions, which are topologically nontrivial spin textures. The theoretical justification for such a decomposition has long remained an open problem. Using a controlled semiclassical approach that includes all phase-space Berry curvatures, we show that the solution of the Boltzmann equation leads to a Hall resistivity that is just the sum of an anomalous term arising from momentum-space curvature and a topological term related to the real-space curvature. We also present numerically exact results from a Kubo formalism that complement the semiclassical approach.