The spontaneous Hall effect refers to the phenomenon where the trajectory of charge carriers bends as if under a magnetic field, even without an external magnetic field. The spontaneous Hall effect is typically observed in ferromagnetic or ferrimagnet...
The spontaneous Hall effect refers to the phenomenon where the trajectory of charge carriers bends as if under a magnetic field, even without an external magnetic field. The spontaneous Hall effect is typically observed in ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic materials with a net magnetization but can also occur in antiferromagnetic materials that either lack net magnetization or have a net magnetization much smaller than the Hall effect. When the spontaneous Hall effect is proportional to the net magnetization, it is called the anomalous Hall effect. The anomalous Hall effect can be further divided into intrinsic and extrinsic contributions, with the intrinsic anomalous Hall effect being related to the Berry curvature in momentum space, independent of scattering mechanisms. When a fictitious magnetic field, generated by spin clusters forming a solid angle, induces the spontaneous Hall effect regardless of the net magnetization, it is called the topological Hall effect. However, spin clusters forming a solid angle are also known to act as scattering centers for the extrinsic anomalous Hall effect. Thus, accurately analyzing the origin of the spontaneous Hall effect is a crucial tool for determining magnetic structures, which in turn allows for identifying the energy-momentum dispersion relationship of the electron wave function. This paper presents magnetoresistance and Hall resistivity measurements and analysis of magnetic torque in two magnetic transition metal disulfides containing Co2+ ions. Cobalt disulfide, with a cubic pyrite structure, is an itinerant ferromagnet where the spins of conduction electrons are polarized due to the high electronic density of states and strong Coulomb interactions between electrons. In contrast, the iron and nickel disulfides of the same structure are a semiconducting ferromagnet and a Mott insulator, respectively. Therefore, substituting Co with Fe or Ni ions can significantly alter these materials’ magnetic and conductive properties. This study confirmed that at doping levels below 10%, the conductivity and ferromagnetism of cobalt disulfide are maintained, and Vegard’s law is still satisfied. Among the samples in this doping range, the sample with 5% Fe doping showed a sharp increase in the anomalous Hall effect. This result aligns well with calculations based on DFT+U , which indicate that the source of the Berry curvature in cobalt disul- fide lies at E = EF−60meV, causing the anomalous Hall effect to increase sharply as EF is tuned. While the typically reported values of anomalous Hall conductivity are in the range of 100 ∼ 1000 (Ωcm)−1, the sample with 5% Fe doping exhibited a maximum anomalous Hall conductivity of 2507 (Ωcm)−1. For reference, the expected anomalous Hall conductivity due to a single Berry curvature source in cobalt disulfide at its lattice spacing is approximately 699 (Ωcm)−1. The generally small values of anomalous Hall conductivity are due to the cancellation of multiple Berry curvature sources with opposite signs arising from symmetry. In contrast, the large anomalous Hall effect in cobalt disulfide was found to be due to four massive Dirac nodes symmetrically distributed along the Γ−K direction in momentum space, all of which have the same sign. Magnetic skyrmions with the size of the atomic level are predicted to manifest in frustrated lattice structures or in magnetic systems where interactions among more than four magnetic moments dominate. However, these structures have only been observed in a few-layer Fe or Mn adatom systems grown on Re(0001) or Cu(111) substrates. Recently, neutron scattering experiments revealed that the low- temperature magnetic structure of Co1/3TaS2, where Co2+ ions are intercalated in the van der Waals gaps of a 2D transition metal disulfide, forms a triple-Q (3Q) magnetic skyrmion structure. This structure consists of four spin sublattices arranged in a tetrahedral all-in-all-out configuration, where the spins point from the center of a 3D tetrahedron to its vertices and are distributed on the 2D intercalated hexagonal Co layer. This results in a 3Q structure, a superposition of three row-wise (1Q) states equivalent under a 120○ rotational transformation of the hexagonal lattice. The topological Hall effect in Co1/3TaS2 is induced by the fictitious magnetic field generated by the 3Q spin clusters. Despite some understanding of the magnetic structure, several phenomena in Co1/3TaS2 remain unexplained, such as (i) the nonzero net magnetization and (ii) the metamagnetic transition occurring at a critical field Hc2—different from the spin-flip transition at Hc1. In this paper, we analyze the topological Hall effect and magnetoresistance measured at various angles, revealing that the metamagnetic transition responds differently for A- and B-type domains of the 3Q structure, which we describe using a simple 2× 2 model of the magnetic transition. Additionally, analysis of magnetic torque measured along the a∗c and ac planes shows that the net magnetization of Co1/3TaS2 consists of an isotropic linear component and an anisotropic c-axis component. The unusual hysteresis in magnetic torque is explained by the hysteresis in the magnetization along the c-axis. The periodic variation of magnetic torque in the a∗a plane as a function of the applied magnetic field suggests that the magnetic ground state of Co1/3TaS2 may alternate between two 3Q states, (3Q1) and (3Q2), related by rotational symmetry.