Recent experimental observations of unexpectedly large thermal Hall conductivities, κH, in insulating materials, including the parent compounds of the high temperature superconducting cuprates, likely reflect an extrinsic contribution from a yet to be identified extrinsic source of skew scattering of acoustic phonons. We show that resonant scattering of phonons from a certain class of three-level systems produces strong skew scattering in the presence of a modest magnetic field. We interpret this as a first step towards understanding the experiments.
@article{arxiv.2109.12117,
title = {Large extrinsic phonon thermal Hall effect from resonant scattering},
author = {Xiao-Qi Sun and Jing-Yuan Chen and Steven A. Kivelson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12117},
year = {2022}
}