Phonon Hall effect with first-principles calculations

Phonon Hall effect (PHE) has attracted a lot of attention in recent years with many theoretical and experimental explorations published. While experiments work on complicated materials, theoretical studies are still hovering around the phenomenon-based models. Moreover, previous microscopic theory was found unable to explain large thermal Hall conductivity obtained by experiments in strontium titanate (STO). Therefore, in an attempt to bridge this gap, we implement first-principles calculations to explore the PHE in real materials. Our work provides a benchmark of the PHE in sodium chloride (NaCl) under a large external magnetic field. Moreover, we demonstrate our results in barium titanate (BTO) and discuss the results in STO in detail about their deviation from experiments. As a possible future direction, we further propose that the inner electronic Berry curvature and cubic potential plays important roles in the PHE in STO.