2015/12/31 by Christoph P. Orth, Tibor Sekera, Christoph Bruder +1 · 2 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Anderson impurity model #Combinatorics #Condensed matter physics #Impurity #Insulator (electricity) #Lattice (music) #Mathematics #Phase transition #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Symmetry protected topological order #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological insulator #Topological order #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/srep24007
published as Sci. Rep. 6, 24007 (2016) · 7 pages, 5 figures
openalex publication_date 2016/04/05 · arxiv created 2016/04/06 · arxiv updated 2016/04/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
It has been proposed that adding disorder to a topologically trivial mercury telluride/cadmium telluride (HgTe/CdTe) quantum well can induce a transition to a topologically nontrivial state. The resulting state was termed topological Anderson insulator and was found in computer simulations of the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model. Here, we show that the topological Anderson insulator is a more universal phenomenon and also appears in the Kane-Mele model of topological insulators on a honeycomb lattice. We numerically investigate the interplay of the relevant parameters, and establish the parameter range in which the topological Anderson insulator exists. A staggered sublattice potential turns out to be a necessary condition for the transition to the topological Anderson insulator. For weak enough disorder, a calculation based on the lowest-order Born approximation reproduces quantitatively the numerical data. Our results thus considerably increase the number of candidate materials for the topological Anderson insulator phase.