In: Electrical Engineering
Zinc, a divalent metal, was measured to have a positive Hall coefficient. Explain the reason (theory) behind this fact.
Zinc is alkali metal. The simple expectation for the Hall coefficient and conductivity /resistivity is based on the 'free electron theory' or Drude theory.
This theory is corpuscular and assumes that the charge carries act like gaseous atoms in the kinetic theory.
Effects such as hall and conductivity are depend upon the number/density of carriers, regarded as individual corpuscles and independent of the effects of the lattice and wave machines. This theory is only really successful for alkali metals and unsuitable for other materials. Zinc is a alkali metal. This theory applicable for zinc.
Better theories from wave/quantum mechanics show that the De Broglie wave sufers interference in the lattice such that, although its main component is in the direction of the corpuscular vector, the wave also has components in other directions.
The main component is perpendicular to the imposed magnatic field, but the others are not so are affe3by it differently, leading to skewing /diminishing /reversal of the hall voltage.
This is best explanation for it.