Dominance of extrinsic scattering mechanisms in the orbital Hall effect: graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides and topological antiferromagnets

Abstract

The theory of the orbital Hall effect (OHE), a transverse flow of orbital angular momentum in response to an electric field, has concentrated overwhelmingly on intrinsic mechanisms. Here, using a quantum kinetic formulation, we determine the full OHE in the presence of short-range disorder using 2D massive Dirac fermions as a prototype. We find that, in doped systems, extrinsic effects associated with the Fermi surface (skew scattering and side jump) provide $\approx 95\%$ of the OHE. This suggests that, at experimentally relevant transport densities, the OHE is primarily extrinsic.