Phase structure of the topological Anderson insulator

Abstract

We study the disordered topological Anderson insulator in a 2-D (square not strip) geometry. We first report the phase diagram of finite systems and then study the evolution of phase boundaries when the system size is increased to a very large $1120 \times 1120$ area. We establish that conductance quantization can occur without a bulk band gap, and that there are two distinct scaling regions with quantized conductance: TAI-I with a bulk band gap, and TAI-II with localized bulk states. We show that there is no intervening insulating phase between the bulk conduction phase and the TAI-I and TAI-II scaling regions, and that there is no metallic phase at the transition between the quantized and insulating phases. Centered near the quantized-insulating transition there are very broad peaks in the eigenstate size and fractal dimension $d_2$; in a large portion of the conductance plateau eigenstates grow when the disorder strength is increased. The fractal dimension at the peak maximum is $d_2 \approx 1.5$. Effective medium theory (CPA, SCBA) predicts well the boundaries and interior of the gapped TAI-I scaling region, but fails to predict all boundaries save one of the ungapped TAI-II scaling region. We report conductance distributions near several phase transitions and compare them with critical conductance distributions for well-known models.