Orbital Origin of Intrinsic Planar Hall Effect

Abstract

Recent experiments reported an antisymmetric planar Hall effect, where the Hall current is odd in the in-plane magnetic field and scales linearly with both electric and magnetic fields applied. Existing theories rely exclusively on a spin origin, which requires spin-orbit coupling to take effect. Here, we develop a general theory for the intrinsic planar Hall effect (IPHE), highlighting a previously unknown orbital mechanism and connecting it to a band geometric quantity -- the anomalous orbital polarizability (AOP). Importantly, the orbital mechanism does not request spin-orbit coupling, so sizable IPHE can occur and is dominated by orbital contribution in systems with weak spin-orbit coupling. Combined with first-principles calculations, we demonstrate our theory with quantitative evaluation for bulk materials $\mathrm{TaSb_{2}}$, $\mathrm{NbAs_{2}}$, and $\mathrm{SrAs_{3}}$. We further show that AOP and its associated orbital IPHE can be greatly enhanced at topological band crossings, offering a new way to probe topological materials.