Emergent Skyrmion Hall Effect in $d$-wave Altermagnets at Finite Temperature

Abstract

Altermagnets combine compensated magnetic order with unconventional symmetry-dependent responses, offering a promising platform for spintronic applications. Here, we show that a voltage-controlled magnetic-anisotropy gradient drives altermagnetic (ATM) skyrmions in a nearly rectilinear, Hall-free manner in the absence of thermal fluctuations, owing to their strongly compensated gyrotropic response. Thermal magnons qualitatively modify this behavior by increasing the longitudinal drag through magnon--skyrmion scattering and generating a transverse reaction force through handedness-dependent skew scattering. Owing to the anisotropic altermagnetic magnon band structure, the relative transport weights of the two magnon handednesses are interchanged between propagation along the $x$ and $y$ directions, resulting in transverse skyrmion drifts of opposite sign. By contrast, along the high-symmetry direction, the two magnon handednesses remain degenerate and their transverse contributions cancel, preserving Hall-free motion even at finite temperature. We thus uncover a thermally emergent anisotropic skyrmion Hall effect whose direction-dependent magnitude and sign originate from the intrinsic symmetry-dependent magnon spectrum, making it a generic finite-temperature dynamical feature of ATM skyrmions. Our results establish a low-power route toward electrically controlled and thermally tunable ATM skyrmion transport.