Giant Planar Hall Effect in Topological Metals

Abstract

Much excitement has been generated recently by the experimental observation of the chiral anomaly in condensed matter physics. This manifests as strong negative longitudinal magnetoresistance and has so far been clearly observed in Na$_3$Bi, ZrTe$_5$, and GdPtBi. In this work we point out that the chiral anomaly must lead to another effect in topological metals, that has been overlooked so far: Giant Planar Hall Effect (GPHE), which is the appearance of a large transverse voltage when the in plane magnetic field is not aligned with the current. Moreover, we demonstrate that the GPHE is closely related to the angular narrowing of the negative longitudinal magnetoresistance signal, observed experimentally.