Quantized Topological Anderson-Thouless Pump

TL;DR

This paper introduces disorder-induced topological pumps, including an intrinsic topological Anderson-Thouless pump, demonstrating their mechanisms, robustness, and potential realizations in ultracold atoms or photonic systems.

Contribution

It proposes the novel concept of disorder-induced topological pumps, especially the intrinsic topological Anderson-Thouless pump, expanding the understanding of topological transport phenomena.

Findings

Disorder can induce topological pumping in noninteracting and interacting systems.

The intrinsic TATP arises from hopping quasiperiodic disorder, acting as a dynamical analogue of topological Anderson insulators.

TATP can be extended to higher-order topological systems with quantized corner transports.

Abstract

Thouless pump with quantized transports is topologically robust against small perturbations and disorders, while breaks down under sufficiently strong disorders. Here we propose counter-intuitive topological pumps induced by disorders in noninteracting and interacting systems. We first show an extrinsic topological pump driven by the on-site quasiperiodic potential for a two-loop sequence, where the disorder inequivalently suppresses the topology of two pump loops. Moreover, we reveal an intrinsic topological pump induced by the hopping quasiperiodic disorder from a trivial single-loop pump in the clean limit, dubbed the topological Anderson-Thouless pump (TATP) as a dynamical analogue of topological Anderson insulators. We demonstrate that the mechanism of the TATP is the disorder-induced shift of gapless critical points and the TATP can even exhibit in the dynamic disorder and interacting cases. Finally, we extend the TATP to higher-order topological systems with disorder-induced quantized corner transports. Our proposed TATPs present new members of the topological pump family and could be realized with ultracold atoms or photonic waveguides.