Extrinsic Orbital Hall Effect: Interplay Between Diffusive and Intrinsic Transport

Abstract

Despite the recent success of identifying experimental signatures of the orbital Hall effect (OHE), the research on the microscopic mechanisms behind this unique phenomenon is still in its infancy. Here, using a gapped 2D Dirac material as a model system of the OHE, we develop a microscopic theory of orbital transport which captures extrinsic disorder effects non-perturbatively. We show that it predicts several hitherto unknown effects, including (i) a strong dependence of the OHE conductivity with the strength and symmetry of the impurity scattering potential, and (ii) a smooth crossover from intrinsic to extrinsic OHE as a function of the Fermi energy. In contrast to previous (perturbative) studies, the OHE is found to exhibit bona fide diffusive behavior in the dilute impurity limit, which we trace back to the dominance of skew scattering-type processes. Our work unveils the crucial nature of nonperturbative vertex corrections for a correct description of extrinsic orbital Hall transport and confirms common short-range impurities as key enablers of the OHE.