Experimental Observation of Higher-Order Topological Anderson Insulators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates both theoretically and experimentally that disorder can induce higher-order topological phases, specifically corner states, in a modified Haldane model using electric circuit analogs, challenging the view that disorder is always detrimental.

Contribution

It provides the first evidence that disorder can induce higher-order topological phases and constructs a classical electric circuit platform to observe these phenomena.

Findings

Disorder induces higher-order topological corner states.

Electric circuits can simulate and observe topological Anderson insulators.

Disorder can create robust corner states in topologically trivial systems.

Abstract

Recently, a new family of symmetry-protected higher-order topological insulators has been proposed and was shown to host lower-dimensional boundary states. However, with the existence of the strong disorder in the bulk, the crystal symmetry is broken, and the associated corner states are disappeared. It is well known that the emergence of robust edge states and quantized transport can be induced by adding sufficient disorders into a topologically trivial insulator, that is the so-called topological Anderson insulator. The question is whether disorders can also cause the higher-order topological phase. This is not known so far, because interactions between disorders and the higher-order topological phases are completely different from those with the first-order topological system. Here, we demonstrate theoretically that the disorderinduced higher-order topological corner state and quantized fraction corner charge can appear in a modified Haldane model. In experiments, we construct the classical analog of such higherorder topological Anderson insulators using electric circuits and observe the disorder-induced corner state through the voltage measurement. Our work defies the conventional view that the disorder is detrimental to the higher-order topological phase, and offers a feasible platform to investigate the interaction between disorders and higher-order topological phases.