Disorder-induced delocalization and reentrance in a Chern-Hopf insulator

TL;DR

This paper explores how disorder affects a three-dimensional topological insulator called the Chern-Hopf insulator, revealing its stability, reentrant topological behavior, and critical properties through numerical and analytical methods.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of disorder effects on the Chern-Hopf insulator, including stability, reentrant behavior, and critical exponents.

Findings

The Chern-Hopf insulator remains stable up to moderate disorder levels.

Disorder initially enhances the topological phase before causing a transition to a diffusive metal.

The estimated correlation length exponent is approximately 1.0, aligning with Chern universality.

Abstract

The Chern-Hopf insulator is an unconventional three-dimensional topological insulator with a bulk gap and gapless boundary states without protection from global discrete symmetries. This study investigates its fate in the presence of disorder. We find it stable up to moderate disorder by analyzing the surface states and the zero energy bulk density of states using large-scale numerical simulation and the self-consistent Born approximation. The disordered Chern-Hopf insulator shows reentrant behavior: the disorder initially enhances the topological phase before driving it across an insulator-diffusive metal transition. We examine the associated critical exponents via finite-size scaling of the bulk density of states, participation entropy, and two-terminal conductance. We estimate the correlation length exponent $\nu\simeq 1.0(1)$, consistent with the clean two-dimensional Chern universality and distinct from the integer quantum Hall exponent.