Spin Hall Effects Due to Phonon Skew Scattering

A diversity of spin Hall effects in metallic systems is known to rely on Mott skew scattering. In this work its high-temperature counterpart, phonon skew scattering, which is expected to be of foremost experimental relevance, is investigated. In particular, the phonon skew scattering spin Hall conductivity is found to be practically T independent for temperatures above the Debye temperature T-D. As a consequence, in Rashba-like systems a high-T linear behavior of the spin Hall angle demonstrates the dominance of extrinsic spin-orbit scattering only if the intrinsic spin splitting is smaller than the temperature.