Berry Curvature on the Fermi Surface: Anomalous Hall Effect as a Topological Fermi-Liquid Property

The intrinsic anomalous Hall effect in metallic ferromagnets is shown to be controlled by Berry phases accumulated by adiabatic motion of quasiparticles on the Fermi surface, and is purely a Fermi-liquid property, not a ``bulk'' Fermi sea property like Landau diamagnetism, as has been previously supposed. Berry phases are a new topological ingredient that must be added to Landau Fermi-liquid theory in the presence of broken inversion or time-reversal symmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 0 figures; to appear in Physical Review Letters; cleaner form of main formula+note added confirming continued validity of result in interacting Fermi liquids: + improved summary paragraph stating result; final published version (minor changes

Dynamic Fracture in Single Crystal Silicon

We have measured the velocity of a running crack in brittle single crystal silicon as a function of energy flow to the crack tip. The experiments are designed to permit direct comparison with molecular dynamics simulations; therefore the experiments provide an indirect but sensitive test of interatomic potentials. Performing molecular dynamics simulations of brittle crack motion at the atomic scale we find that experiments and simulations disagree showing that interatomic potentials are not yet well understood.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 19 reference

Density Functional Theory of Multicomponent Quantum Dots

Quantum dots with conduction electrons or holes originating from several bands are considered. We assume the particles are confined in a harmonic potential and assume the electrons (or holes) belonging to different bands to be different types of fermions with isotropic effective masses. The density functional method with the local density approximation is used. The increased number of internal (Kohn-Sham) states leads to a generalisation of Hund's first rule at high densities. At low densitites the formation of Wigner molecules is favored by the increased internal freedom.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Necessary and sufficient condition for longitudinal magnetoresistance

Since the Lorentz force is perpendicular to the magnetic field, it should not affect the motion of a charge along the field. This argument seems to imply absence of longitudinal magnetoresistance (LMR) which is, however, observed in many materials and reproduced by standard semiclassical transport theory applied to particular metals. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition on the shape of the Fermi surface for non-zero LMR. Although an anisotropic spectrum is a pre-requisite for LMR, not all types of anisotropy can give rise to the effect: a spectrum should not be separable in any sense. More precisely, the combination $k_{\rho}v_{\phi}/v_{\rho}$, where $k_\rho$ is the radial component of the momentum in a cylindrical system with the z-axis along the magnetic field and $v_{\rho} (v_{\phi}$) is the radial (tangential) component of the velocity, should depend on the momentum along the field. For some lattice types, this condition is satisfied already at the level of nearest-neighbor hopping; for others, the required non-separabality occurs only if next-to-nearest-neighbor hopping is taken into account.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Berry phase effect in anomalous thermoelectric transport

We develop a theory of Berry phase effect in anomalous transport in ferromagnets driven by statistical forces such as the gradient of temperature or chemical potential. Here a charge Hall current arises from the Berry phase correction to the orbital magnetization rather than from the anomalous velocity which does not exist in the absence of a mechanical force. A finite-temperature formula for the orbital magnetization is derived, which enables us to provide an explicit expression for the off-diagonal thermoelectric conductivity, to establish the Mott relation between the anomalous Nernst and Hall effects, and to reaffirm the Onsager relations between reciprocal thermoelectric conductivities. A first-principles evaluation of our expression is carried out for the material CuCr$_2$Se$_{4-x}$Br$_x$, obtaining quantitative agreement with a recent experiment.Comment: Published version in PR

Dynamical stability of the crack front line

Dynamical stability of the crack front line that propagates between two plates is studied numerically using the simple two-dimensional mass-spring model. It is demonstrated that the straight front line is unstable for low speed while it becomes stable for high speed. For the uniform model, the roughness exponent in the slower speed region is fairly constant around 0.4 and there seems to be a rough-smooth transition at a certain speed. For the inhomogeneous case with quenched randomness, the transition is gradual.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Weak localization in mesoscopic hole transport: Berry phases and classical correlations

We consider phase-coherent transport through ballistic and diffusive two-dimensional hole systems based on the Kohn-Luttinger Hamiltonian. We show that intrinsic heavy-hole light-hole coupling gives rise to clear-cut signatures of an associated Berry phase in the weak localization which renders the magneto-conductance profile distinctly different from electron transport. Non-universal classical correlations determine the strength of these Berry phase effects and the effective symmetry class, leading even to antilocalization-type features for circular quantum dots and Aharonov-Bohm rings in the absence of additional spin-orbit interaction. Our semiclassical predictions are quantitatively confirmed by numerical transport calculations

Large thermoelectric figure of merit for 3D topological Anderson insulators via line dislocation engineering

We study the thermoelectric properties of three-dimensional topological Anderson insulators with line dislocations. We show that at high densities of dislocations the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT can be dominated by one-dimensional topologically-protected conducting states channeled through the lattice screw dislocations in the topological insulator materials with a non-zero time-reversal-invariant momentum such as Bi_{1-x}Sb_x. When the chemical potential does not exceed much the mobility edge the ZT at room temperatures can reach large values, much higher than unity for reasonable parameters, hence making this system a strong candidate for applications in heat management of nano-devices.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Nonlinear optical properties of push–pull polyenes for electro-optics

Improved nonlinear organic chromophores of varying conjugation length with either thiobarbituric acid or 3-dicyanomethylene-2,3-dihydrobenzothiophene-1,1-dioxide (FORON® Blue) acceptors have been synthesized and investigated for their nonlinear optical properties. Very large quadratic hyperpolarizabilities β(−2ω; ω, ω) have been found, up to 25,700×10^(−48) esu at λ=1.91 μm. In a guest–host polymer very high electro-optic (EO) coefficients, of up to 55 pm/V, have been determined at λ=1.31 μm with 20-wt % chromophore loading. We find good agreement between molecular parameters evaluated by electric-field-induced second-harmonic generation (EFISH) and the measurements of guest–host solid–solid solutions. The latter method is well suited to the determination of the product of dipole moment μ and hyperpolarizability β quickly and reliably at the wavelength of interest for EO applications without the complications associated with EFISH measurements