Electrical Conductivity in Quantum Materials

Abstract

In recent years, there is an increasing interest in transport phenomena that are fundamentally linked to the presence of multiple bands. In this thesis, we develop, discuss, and apply a theory of the electrical conductivity that includes interband contributions within a microscopic approach. We derive formulas of the conductivity tensor $\sigma^{\alpha\beta}$ and the Hall conductivity tensor $\sigma^{\alpha\beta\eta}_\text{H}$ for a general two-band model. This minimal model of a multiband system captures a broad variety of very different physical phenomena ranging from spiral spin density waves to Chern insulators. We motivate and derive a unique and physically transparent decomposition of the conductivity tensors by identifying intra- and interband contributions as well as symmetric and antisymmetric contributions under the exchange of the current and the electric field directions. Using these criteria, we find that the symmetric interband contribution of $\sigma^{\alpha\beta}$ is connected to the quantum metric, whereas the antisymmetric part involves the Berry curvature and captures the intrinsic anomalous Hall effect. We include a phenomenological relaxation rate $\Gamma$ of arbitrary size to study the relevance of the interband contributions systematically. Our conductivity formulas are applied to models and experiments of recent interest. We identify typical scaling behaviors of the conductivities with respect to $\Gamma$ in agreement with theoretical and experimental results. Recent experiments on hole-doped cuprates under very high magnetic fields show a drastic change of the Hall number when entering the pseudogap regime, which is shown to be consistent with the onset of spiral magnetic order. We analyze the experimental results with our formulas of the longitudinal and the Hall conductivity and clarify the validity of the broadly used Boltzmann-like conductivity formulas.