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Zeeman-activated Berry-curvature magnetotransport from the bulk of nonmagnetic metals with inversion symmetry

Rhonald Burgos Atencia1, Antonio Vecchione2, Denys Makarov3, and Carmine Ortix1,2

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 235134 – Published 22 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/2j93-3w5n

Abstract

The Berry curvature (BC)—a quantity encoding the geometry of electronic wavefunctions—governs various electronic transport effects in quantum materials. In magnetic systems, the BC is reponsible for the intrinsic part of the anomalous Hall conductivity. Local concentrations of BC in noncentrosymmetric materials can lead instead to the quantum nonlinear Hall effect. Here, we argue that the bulk of nonmagnetic metals with inversion symmetry—systems where the BC is forced to vanish at any momentum—can be endowed with substantial concentrations of BC even with an infinitesimally small Zeeman coupling. This Zeeman-activated BC, independent of the magnetic field strength and instead related to the degree of nonparabolicity of the electronic bands, couples to the electronic orbital motion to generate a negative longitudinal magnetoresistance that scales with the relaxation time as the Drude resistivity. We show that the Zeeman-actived BC and the related intrinsic negative magnetoresistivity are generic: they appear in all centrosymmetric point groups and can occur both in topological and conventional conductors.

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 235134– Published 22 June, 2026
  • Received 9 July 2025
  • Revised 2 May 2026
  • Accepted 3 June 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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