The anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic Fe: Skew scattering or side jump?

The question is investigated whether the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in Fe films is due to skew scattering or side jump. For this purpose sandwiches of FeIn are investigated in which the conduction electrons carry their drift velocity across the interface. This yields an additional AHE conductance ∆Gxy whose dependence on the In mean free path is used to determine the mechanism of the AHE in the Fe film. The structure of the Fe film is kept constant. PACS: 72.10.-d, 72.25.Mk, 73.40.Jn72.25.Ba, B145 In ferromagnetic metals and metals with magnetic impurities one observes two contributions to the Hall effect, (i) the normal Hall effect and (ii) the anomalous Hall effect (AHE). The AHE is caused by spin-orbit scattering through the interaction of the conduction electron spin with the magnetic moments of the sample. The anomalous Hall effect was already observed by Hall a century ago [1]. However, theoretically it is a rather complicated problem. There are two main mechanisms discussed in the literature, (a) skew scattering and (b) side jump. Both require a scattering mechanism for the conduction electrons and vanish in pure samples. The first models of skew scattering were developed by Karpulus and Luttinger [2] and Smit [3], while the side jump was proposed by Berger [4]. Due to its importance in spintronics, the anomalous Hall effect has been intensively studied in recent years [5], [6], [7], [8] (for further references see [9]). Recently an additional