Eur. Phys. J. B 81, 197-202 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-11002-x

Phonon Hall effect in ionic crystals in the presence of static magnetic field

¹ Department of Physics and Centre for Computational Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117542 Singapore, Republic of Singapore
² NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering, 117456 Singapore, Republic of Singapore

Corresponding author: ^a g0801310@nus.edu.sg

Received: 21 December 2010
Published online: 25 May 2011

Abstract

We study phonon Hall effect (PHE) for ionic crystals in the presence of static magnetic field. Using Green-Kubo formula, we present an exact calculation of thermal conductivity tensor by considering both positive and negative frequency phonons. Numerical results are shown for some lattices such as hexagonal lattices, triangular lattices, and square lattices. We find that the PHE occurs on the nonmagnetic ionic crystal NaCl, although the magnitude is very small which is due to the tiny charge-to-mass ratio of the ions. The off-diagonal thermal conductivity is finite for nonzero magnetic field and changes sign for high value of magnetic field at high temperature. We also found that the off-diagonal thermal conductivity diverges as at low temperature.