Anomalous Hall effect at the Lifshitz transition in ZrTe5

Abstract

Zirconium pentatelluride ZrTe5 is a topological semimetal. The presence of a temperature induced Lifshitz transition, in which the Fermi level goes from the conduction band to the valence band with increasing temperature, provides unique opportunities to study the interplay between Fermi-surface topology, dynamics of Dirac fermions, and Berry curvature in one system. Here we present a combined experimental and theoretical study and show that a low energy model can be used to understand the complicated Hall response and large anomalous Hall effect observed in ZrTe5 over a wide range of temperature and magnetic field. We found that the anomalous Hall contribution dominates the Hall response in a narrow temperature window around the Lifshitz transition, away from which the orbital contribution dominates. Moreover, our results indicate that a topological phase transition coexists with the Lifshitz transition. Our model provides a unifying framework to understand the Hall effect in semimetals with large Zeeman splitting and non-trivial topology.