Anomalous Hall effect in the magnetic Weyl semimetal NdAlGe with plateaus observed at low temperatures

In the RAl(Si,Ge) (R: lanthanides) family, both spatial inversion and time-reversal symmetries are broken. This may offer opportunities to study Weyl-fermion physics in nontrivial spin structures emerging from a noncentrosymmetric crystal structure. In this study, we investigated the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in NdAlGe via magnetotransport, magnetization, and magnetic torque measurements down to 40 mK (0.4 K for magnetization). The single crystals grown by a laser-heated floating-zone method exhibit a single magnetic phase transition at T_M = 13.5 K, where the TM is the transition temperature. With the magnetic field parallel to the easy [001] axis, the AHE gradually evolves as the temperature decreases below T_M. The anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) reaches ∼320 Ohm^(−1)cm^(−1) at 40 mK in the magnetically saturated state. Except in low-temperature low-field plateau phases, the AHC and magnetization are proportional, and their ratio agrees with the ratios for conventional ferromagnets, suggesting that the intrinsic AHE occurs by the Karplus-Luttinger mechanism. Below ∼0.6 K, the curves of Hall resistivity against the field exhibit plateaus at low fields below ∼0.5 T, correlating with the plateaus in the magnetization curve. For the first plateau, the magnetization is one order of magnitude smaller than the magnetically saturated state, whereas the AHE is more than half that in the saturated state. This finding under well below T_M suggests that the AHE at the first plateau is not governed by the magnetization and may be interpreted based on a multipole or spin chirality.