Vacancy-Induced Topological Phase Transition via Valley Annihilation in an Anisotropic Honeycomb Lattice
A single missing atom can drive a topological phase transition in a lattice that is otherwise trivial for all values of its parameters. We demonstrate this in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice with anisotropic nearest-neighbor hopping ratio $t'/t$. The pristine lattice is topologically trivial for all $t'/t$ by the Nielsen-Ninomiya fermion-doubling theorem: Dirac valleys appear in pairs whose topological charges cancel identically in any bulk invariant. A single vacancy breaks this cancelation, acting as an internal boundary with defect winding number $\nu_3=\mp 1$ for $t'/t<2$. At $t'/t=2$, the two Dirac valleys merge and annihilate; the number of active pseudospinor degrees of freedom drops from $m=2$ to $m=1$, violating the condition $d+D+1=2m$ required for a non-trivial winding number. The winding number collapses to $\nu_3=0$: a topological phase transition within a fixed symmetry class (BDI), driven entirely by a bulk Lifshitz transition and observable only through the vacancy. The defect zero mode crosses over from algebraic (${\sim}1/r$) to stronger spatial confinement, with its inverse participation ratio reaching a sharp minimum at criticality. Wavefront dislocations in the local density of states provide a direct, spatially resolved image of $\nu_3$, accessible in graphene and in photonic and cold-atom analogs.