Structural chirality gives rise to characteristic responses that change sign with the handedness of the crystal structure. One example is electrical magnetochiral anisotropy (eMChA), a change in resistivity that depends linearly on the applied current and magnetic field. Motivated by recent measurements of a strong eMChA in $p$-doped trigonal tellurium, we carry out an ab initio study of the intrinsic eMChA response in this material as a function of temperature and doping concentration. We use the semiclassical Boltzmann transport formalism within the constant relaxation time approximation to express the bulk eMChA response tensor in terms of the energy dispersion, intrinsic magnetic moment (both spin and orbital), and Berry curvature of the conduction Bloch states. We find that the orbital-Zeeman coupling dominates the calculated intrinsic response, with smaller contributions coming from the spin-Zeeman coupling and from the Berry curvature, and that the effect is maximal when both the current and magnetic field are along the trigonal axis. The calculated results show a reasonable agreement with the available experimental data. To facilitate further ab initio studies of eMChA in other materials, the code developed in this work is made available as part of the WannierBerri package.

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• Anisotropic magnetoresistance
• Berry curvature
• Chirality
• Electrical conductivity
• Magnetic texture
• Transport phenomena
• Magnetic moment
• Boltzmann theory
• First-principles calculations
• Wannier function methods