Magnetochiral anisotropy-induced nonlinear planar Hall effect in Topological Insulator surface states

Abstract

In an intriguing recent experiment, it has been found that the two-dimensional (2D) surface states of a three-dimensional (3D) strong topological insulator (TI) support a non-zero Hall voltage transverse to an applied electric field even when the external magnetic field is in the plane (i.e., the in-plane Lorentz force vanishes). This so-called planar Hall effect (PHE) of TI surface states is found to be non-linear, i.e., the Hall voltage scales quadratically with the applied electric field and linearly with the in-plane magnetic field. In this paper, we derive the non-linear PHE for strong topological insulator surface states and show that the derivations contained in the previous literature are incomplete, which can lead to quantitative or even in some cases qualitative errors in the estimates for the nonlinear planar Hall resistance. We derive the complete expressions for the non-linear planar Hall currents for TI surface states with broken particle-hole symmetry and provide results for different regimes of the surface state Hamiltonian which can be compared with future experiments.