Anderson localization and topological transition in Chern insulators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder affects topological properties and localization in Chern insulators, revealing that topological phases are more robust against disorder when it is sublattice-specific, leading to a metallic state at high disorder.

Contribution

It uncovers the resilience of Chern numbers under sublattice-specific disorder and characterizes the transition to metallic states in disordered topological insulators.

Findings

Chern number persists at higher disorder levels with sublattice-specific disorder.

Disorder on one sublattice leads to non-standard localization behavior.

Strong disorder results in a metallic final state.

Abstract

We analyse the topological transition and localization evolution of disordered two dimensional systems with non trivial topology based on bipartite lattices. Chern insulators with broken time reversal symmetry show non standard behavior for disorder realizations selectively distributed on only one of the sublattices. The Chern number survives to a much stronger disorder strength (one order of magnitude higher) than in the equally distributed disordered case and the final state in the strongly disordered case is metallic.