Electric field tuning of the anomalous Hall effect at oxide interfaces

Anomalous Hall effect is the phenomenon where the transport properties of the spin-polarized electrons are governed by the spin-orbit coupling that couples the orbital and spin degrees of freedom of the electron. Here we show that the anomalous Hall effect at a magnetic interface with strong spin-orbit coupling can be tuned with an external electric field. By altering the strength of the inversion symmetry breaking, the electric field changes the Rashba interaction, which in turn modifies the magnitude of the Berry curvature, the central quantity in determining the anomalous Hall conductivity. The effect is illustrated with a square lattice model, which yields a quadratic dependence of the anomalous Hall conductivity for small electric fields. Explicit density-functional calculations were performed for the recently grown iridate interface, viz., the (SrIrO3)1/(SrMnO3)1 (001) structure, both with and without an electric field, which show a strong electric field dependence. The effect may be potentially useful in spintronics applications