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Published on: September 26, 2014
Recent progress on disorder-induced topological phases
Dan-Wei Zhang1,2,3, Ling-Zhi Tang3
1Key Laboratory of Atomic and Subatomic Structure and Quantum Control (Ministry of Education), Guangdong Basic Research Center of Excellence for Structure and Fundamental Interactions of Matter, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, People's Republic of China.
None:
Topological states of matter in disordered systems without translation symmetry have attracted great interest in recent years. These states with topological characters are not only robust against certain disorders, but also can be counterintuitively induced by disorders from a topologically trivial phase in the clean limit. In this review, we summarize the current theoretical and experimental progress on disorder-induced topological phases in both condensed-matter and artificial systems. We first introduce the topological Anderson insulators (TAIs) induced by random disorders and their topological characterizations and experimental realizations. We then discuss various extensions of TAIs with unique localization phenomena in quasiperiodic and non-Hermitian systems. We also review the theoretical and experimental studies on the disorder-induced topology in dynamical and many-body systems, including topological Anderson-Thouless pumps, disordered correlated topological insulators and average-symmetry protected topological orders acting as interacting TAI phases. Finally, we conclude the review by highlighting potential directions for future explorations.
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