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 (OAM) in response to an electric field, has concentrated 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 ≈95% of the OHE. This suggests that, at experimentally relevant transport densities, the OHE is primarily extrinsic.