Room-Temperature Disorder-Driven Nonlinear Transport in Topological Materials

Recent experiments have reported nonlinear signals in topological materials up to room temperature. Here we show that this response stems from extrinsic spin-orbit contributions to $\mathit{\text{both}}$ impurity and phonon scattering. While skew scattering dominates at low temperatures, the side jump contribution $\propto \tau \mathrm{/}{\tau }_{\beta }$, where $\tau$, ${\tau }_{\beta }$ are the momentum and skew scattering times respectively. Consequently side jump exhibits a weak temperature dependence and remains sizable at room temperature. Our results provide a roadmap for engineering nonlinear transport at ambient conditions.