Anisotropic magnetoresistance and memory effect in bulk systems with extended defects

Abstract

To describe kinetic phenomena in disordered conductors, various acts of scattering of electrons can be often considered as independent, that is captured by the Boltzmann equation. However, in some regimes, especially, in a magnetic field, it becomes necessary to take into account the correlations between different scattering events of electrons on defects at different times in the past. Such memory effects can have a profound impact on the resistivity of 2D semiconductor systems, resulting in giant negative magnetoresistance and microwave-induced resistance oscillations phenomena. This work opens the discussion of the memory effects in 3D conducting systems featured by the presence of extended one-dimensional defects, such as screw dislocations or static charge stripes. We demonstrate that accounting for the memory effect, that is the capture of electrons on collisionless spiral trajectories winding around extended defects, leads to the strong negative magnetoresistance in case when the external magnetic field direction becomes parallel to the defects axis. This effect gives rise to a significant magnetoresistance anisotropy already for an isotropic Fermi surface and no spin-orbit effects. The proposed resistivity feature can be used to detect one-dimensional scattering defects in these systems.