Genuine topological Anderson insulator from impurity induced chirality reversal

Abstract

We investigate a model of Dirac fermions with Haldane type mass impurities which open a global topological gap even in the dilute limit. Surprisingly, we find that the chirality of this mass term, i.e., the sign of the Chern number, can be reversed by tuning the magnitude of the single-impurity scattering. Consequently, the disorder induces a phase disconnected from the clean topological phase, i.e., a genuine topological Anderson insulator. In seeming contradiction to the expectation that mass disorder is an irrelevant perturbation to the clean integer quantum Hall transition, the tri-critical point separating these two Chern insulating phases and a thermal metal phase is located at zero impurity density and connected to the appearance of a zero energy bound state in the continuum corresponding to a divergent Haldane mass impurity. Our conclusions based on the T-matrix expansion are substantiated by large scale Chebyshev-Polynomial-Green-Function numerics. We discuss possible experimental platforms.