Cusplike feature in Hall resistivity of a uniaxial ferromagnet in nonorthogonal Hall geometry

Recent magnetotransport studies on uniaxial ferromagnets have reported a cusplike feature in Hall resistivity when the magnetic field is tilted away from the conventional orthogonal direction of the Hall measurement. This feature has often been attributed to the topological Hall effect arising from a non-coplanar spin structure. In this article, we have studied the uniaxial ferromagnet SmMn$_2$Ge$_2$ to demonstrate that this feature is rather a consequence of the nonorthogonal geometry of the Hall measurement and is expected to appear whenever the magnetic field is applied away from the easy axis of magnetization, nonorthogonal to the sample plane. The Hall resistivity, exhibiting this feature, scales with the orthogonal component of the magnetization, indicating that the observed feature is simply a manifestation of the anomalous Hall effect. We explain the origin of this feature based on the evolution of ferromagnetic domains under a nonorthogonal external magnetic field.