Topological Anderson insulators in systems without time-reversal symmetry

Abstract

Occurrence of topological Anderson insulator (TAI) in HgTe quantum well suggests that when time-reversal symmetry (TRS) is maintained, the pertinent topological phase transition, marked by re-entrant $2e^2/h$ quantized conductance contributed by helical edge states, is driven by disorder. Here we show that when TRS is broken, the physics of TAI becomes even richer. The pattern of longitudinal conductance and nonequilibrium local current %Unlike for conventional topological insulators that, in the %absence of an external magnetic field, support only a single quantized %conductance in the quantum anomalous Hall effect region or a single %re-entrant quantized conductance in TAI, %our model exhibits novel TAI distribution displays novel TAI phases characterized by nonzero Chern numbers, indicating the occurrence of multiple chiral edge modes. Tuning either disorder or Fermi energy (in both topologically trivial and nontrivial phases), drives transitions between these distinct TAI phases, characterized by jumps of the quantized conductance from $0$ to $e^2/h$ and from $e^2/h$ to $2e^2/h$. An effective medium theory based on the Born approximation yields an accurate description of different TAI phases in parameter space.