Large anomalous Hall conductivity induced by spin chirality fluctuation in an ultraclean frustrated antiferromagnet PdCrO2

Abstract

Magnetic frustration of spins often leads to nontrivial spin textures and anomalous Hall responses, but typically below the magnetic transition temperature. The authors observe a giant unconventional anomalous Hall conductivity in the triangularlattice antiferromagnet PdCrO2 well above its Neel temperature, attributed to spin cluster skew scattering. © The Author(s) 2024.; Magnetic frustration, realized in the special geometrical arrangement of localized spins, often promotes topologically nontrivial spin textures in the real space and induces significantly large unconventional Hall responses. This spin Berry curvature effect in itinerant frustrated magnets mainly works with a static spin order, limiting the effective temperature range below the magnetic transition temperature and yielding the typical anomalous Hall conductivity below ~ 103 Ω−1cm−1. Here we show that an ultraclean triangular-lattice antiferromagnet PdCrO2 exhibits a large anomalous Hall conductivity up to ~ 106 Ω−1cm−1 in the paramagnetic state, which is maintained far above the Neel temperature (TN) up to ~ 4TN. The reported enhancement of anomalous Hall response above TN is attributed to the skew scattering of highly mobile Pd electrons to fluctuating but locally-correlated Cr spins with a finite spin chirality. Our findings point at an alternative route to realizing high-temperature giant anomalous Hall responses, exploiting magnetic frustration in the ultraclean regime. © The Author(s) 2024.