Hall Effect Induced by Topologically Trivial Target Skyrmions

Electrons moving through a noncoplanar magnetic texture acquire a Berry phase, which can be described as an effective magnetic field. This effect is known as the topological Hall effect and has been observed in topological spin textures. Motivated by recent experimental realizations, here we study the Hall effect in a nontopological magnetic texture known as a target skyrmion. We start from a simplified classical picture and show that the Hall signal is a nonmonotonic function of both the electronic energy and target skyrmion radius. That observation carries over to the fully quantum mechanical treatment in a Landauer-Büttiker formalism in a mesoscopic setting. Our results suggest that it may possible to detect the presence of target skyrmions in experiments and call for further experimental investigation of the Hall effect in such textures.