Skew scattering in dilute ferromagnetic alloys

The challenging problem of skew scattering for Hall effects in dilute ferromagnetic alloys, with intertwined effects of spin-orbit coupling, magnetism, and impurity scattering, is studied here from first principles. Our main aim is to identify chemical trends and work out simple rules for large skew scattering in terms of the impurity and host states at the Fermi surface, with particular emphasis on the interplay of the spin and anomalous Hall effects in one and the same system. The predicted trends are benchmarked by referring to three different ab initio methods based on different approximations with respect to the electronic structure and transport properties.