Universal behavior of the thermal Hall conductivity

Abstract

We report theoretical and experimental analyses of the anomalous thermal Hall conductivity in correlated systems. For both fermionic and bosonic excitations with nontrivial topology, we show that at "intermediate" temperatures, the anomalous thermal Hall conductivity exhibits an unexpected universal scaling with a simple exponential form. At low temperatures, it behaves differently and reflects the spectral properties of underlying excitations. Our predictions are examined as examples in two prototype compounds, the quantum paraelectric SrTiO3 and the spin-liquid compound RuCl3. The experimental data can be largely covered by our proposed minimal phenomenological model independent of microscopic details, revealing dominant bosonic contributions in SrTiO3 and gapped fermionic excitations in RuCl3. Our work establishes a phenomenological link between microscopic models and experimental data and provides a unified basis for analyzing the anomalous thermal Hall conductivity in correlated systems over a wide temperature region.