Higher-order topological Anderson insulators

Abstract

We study disorder effects in a two-dimensional system with chiral symmetry and find that disorder can induce a quadrupole topological insulating phase (a higher-order topological phase with quadrupole moments) from a topologically trivial phase. Their topological properties manifest in a topological invariant defined based on effective boundary Hamiltonians, the quadrupole moment, and zero-energy corner modes. We find gapped and gapless topological phases and a Griffiths regime. In the gapless topological phase, all the states are localized, while in the Griffiths regime, the states at zero energy become multifractal. We further apply the self-consistent Born approximation to show that the induced topological phase arises from disorder renormalized masses. We finally introduce a practical experimental scheme with topoelectrical circuits where the predicted topological phenomena can be observed by impedance measurements. Our work opens the door to studying higher-order topological Anderson insulators and their localization properties.