Extrinsic orbital Edelstein effect from asymmetric scattering
Abstract
The generation and manipulation of orbital angular momentum (OAM) by an external electric field constitute one of the central themes of orbitronics. In particular, the electrically induced nonequilibrium OAM polarization, known as the orbital Edelstein effect (OEE), has attracted considerable attention in recent years. While the intrinsic band-geometric mechanism and the role of conventional symmetric impurity scattering in the OEE are well understood, the contribution from disorder-induced asymmetric scattering remains unclear. Here, we develop a semiclassical theory that separates the OEE into intrinsic, Drude, side-jump, and third- and fourth-order skew-scattering channels. Unlike the Drude channel, the intrinsic, side-jump, and skew-scattering responses survive only in systems with broken time-reversal symmetry. We find that in a magnetized Rashba two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG), these disorder-induced mechanisms can substantially exceed the intrinsic contribution. Remarkably, we find that for a system with Rashba coupling of $1$ $eV Å$, the orbital magnetization is about one order of magnitude larger than the spin magnetization for the chosen parameters, highlighting the crucial role of orbital degrees of freedom in the Edelstein effect.
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BibTeX
@misc{sarkar2026extrinsic,
title = {{Extrinsic orbital Edelstein effect from asymmetric scattering}},
author = {Sankar Sarkar and Koushik Ghorai and Amit Agarwal},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.04093},
eprint = {2609.04093},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04093},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Extrinsic orbital Edelstein effect from asymmetric scattering
AU - Sankar Sarkar
AU - Koushik Ghorai
AU - Amit Agarwal
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.04093
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04093
AB - The generation and manipulation of orbital angular momentum (OAM) by an external electric field constitute one of the central themes of orbitronics. In particular, the electrically induced nonequilibrium OAM polarization, known as the orbital Edelstein effect (OEE), has attracted considerable attention in recent years. While the intrinsic band-geometric mechanism and the role of conventional symmetric impurity scattering in the OEE are well understood, the contribution from disorder-induced asymmetric scattering remains unclear. Here, we develop a semiclassical theory that separates the OEE into intrinsic, Drude, side-jump, and third- and fourth-order skew-scattering channels. Unlike the Drude channel, the intrinsic, side-jump, and skew-scattering responses survive only in systems with broken time-reversal symmetry. We find that in a magnetized Rashba two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG), these disorder-induced mechanisms can substantially exceed the intrinsic contribution. Remarkably, we find that for a system with Rashba coupling of $1$ $eV Å$, the orbital magnetization is about one order of magnitude larger than the spin magnetization for the chosen parameters, highlighting the crucial role of orbital degrees of freedom in the Edelstein effect.
ER -