Hall effect in topologically trivial isolated flat-band systems

We study the Hall effect in topologically trivial isolated flat-band systems (i.e., flat bands are separated from other bands and have zero Chern number) for a weak magnetic field. In a naive semiclassical picture, the Hall conductivity vanishes when dispersive bands are unoccupied, since there are no mobile carriers. To go beyond the semiclassical picture, we establish a fully quantum mechanical gauge-invariant formula for the Hall conductivity that can be applied to any lattice models. We apply the formula to a general ( N + M )-band model with N dispersive bands and M -fold degenerate isolated flat bands, and find that when the dispersive bands are unoccupied, the total conductivity takes a universal form consisting of the energy difference between the dispersive and flat bands, and the non-Abelian quantum geometric tensor of the flat bands, which can be nonzero in systems with vanishing Berry curvature. We numerically confirm the Hall effect for isolated flat-band lattice models on the honeycomb lattice ( N = M = 1 ) and two different kagome lattices ( N = 2 , M = 1 and N = 1 , M = 2 ).