Topological transition as a percolation of the Berry curvature

Abstract

We first study the importance of the sign of the Berry curvature in the Euler characteristic of the two-dimensional topological material with two bands. Then we report an observation of a character of the topological transition as a percolation of the sign of the Berry curvature. The Berry curvature F has peaks at the Dirac points, enabling us to divide the Brillouin zone into two regions depending on the sign of the F: one with the same sign with a peak and the other with the opposite sign. We observed that when the Chern number is non-zero, the oppositely signed regions are localized. In contrast, in the case of a trivial topology, the oppositely signed regions are delocalized dominantly. Therefore, the oppositely signed region will percolate under the topological phase transition from non-trivial to trivial. We checked this for several models including the Haldane model, the extended Haldane model, and the QWZ model. Our observation may serve as a novel feature of the topological phase transition.