Magnetic freeze-out and anomalous Hall effect in ZrTe 5

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2205.01622
• Publication Date: 2022-07-02
• Authors: Adrien Gourgout; Maxime Leroux; Jean-Loup Smirr; Maxime Massoudzad...; Ricardo P. S. M. ...; David Vignolles; Cyril Proust; Helmuth Berger; Qiang Li; Genda Gu; Christopher C. Homes; Ana Akrap; Benoît Fauqué
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Materials Science; Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons; Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); [PHYS.COND.CM-MS]Physics [physics]/Condensed Matter [cond-mat]/Materials Science [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]; TA401-492; Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); FOS: Physical sciences; [PHYS.COND.CM-SCE]Physics [physics]/Condensed Matter [cond-mat]/Strongly Correlated Electrons [cond-mat.str-el]; Atomic physics. Constitution and properties of matter; 530; Materials of engineering and construction. Mechanics of materials; QC170-197

AbstractThe ultra-quantum limit is achieved when a magnetic field confines an electron gas in its lowest spin-polarised Landau level. Here we show that in this limit, electron doped ZrTe5 shows a metal-insulator transition followed by a sign change of the Hall and Seebeck effects at low temperature. We attribute this transition to a magnetic freeze-out of charge carriers on the ionized impurities. The reduction of the charge carrier density gives way to an anomalous Hall response of the spin-polarised electrons. This behavior, at odds with the usual magnetic freeze-out scenario, occurs in this Dirac metal because of its tiny Fermi energy, extremely narrow band gap and a large g-factor. We discuss the different possible sources (intrinsic or extrinsic) for this anomalous Hall contribution.