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arXiv:2601.22065

Universal Multifractality at the Topological Anderson Insulator Transition

K. Kovalenka, Ahmad Ranjbar, Sam Azadi, Rodion V. Belosludov, Thomas D. Kühne, M. S. Bahramy

Published Jan 29, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Disorder is ubiquitous in quantum materials, and its interplay with topology can generate phases absent in the clean limit. Using the Haldane model as a minimal setting, we show that disorder not only shifts topological boundaries but also stabilizes a topological Anderson insulator (TAI) between trivial and Chern insulating regimes. Employing the local Chern marker as a real-space topological probe, we map the full phase diagram and demonstrate that the TAI forms a finite domain bounded by trivial and Anderson insulators. Multifractal analysis of low-energy eigenstates at the boundary reveals universal critical spectra, independent of whether disorder generates or destroys topology. These results place topology, localization, and criticality within a unified framework and provide clear benchmarks for real-space diagnostics of disordered topological phases.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2601.22065

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Disorder is ubiquitous in quantum materials, and its interplay with topology can generate phases absent in the clean limit. Using the Haldane model as a minimal setting, we show that disorder not only shifts topological boundaries but also stabilizes a topological Anderson insulator (TAI) between trivial and Chern insulating regimes. Employing the local Chern marker as a real-space topological probe, we map the full phase diagram and demonstrate that the TAI forms a finite domain bounded by trivial and Anderson insulators. Multifractal analysis of low-energy eigenstates at the boundary reveals universal critical spectra, independent of whether disorder generates or destroys topology. These results place topology, localization, and criticality within a unified framework and provide clear benchmarks for real-space diagnostics of disordered topological phases.
We study the critical properties of the topological Anderson phase transition in a strongly disordered Chern insulator, separating the topological phase from a trivial Anderson insulator. We show that the transition is characterized by a non-zero electrical conductance and by the emergence of a critical length scale in the real-space profile of the local Chern marker. From this, we extract the correlation-length and the dynamical critical exponents, which are consistent with those of non-interacting models of the integer quantum Hall effect. We then ramp the disorder strength across the transition and study the ensuing dynamics. In contrast to clean topological systems, we find that the excitation density does not follow the Kibble-Zurek scaling. The non-equilibrium length scale associated with the local Chern marker is decoupled from the generation of excitations. For studied system sizes, we find it to be close to the Kibble-Zurek prediction for the topological-to-trivial quench, while it deviates from it for the reverse direction.
We investigate disorder-driven transitions between trivial and topological insulator (TI) phases in two-dimensional (2D) systems. Our study primarily focuses on the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang (BHZ) model with Anderson disorder, while other standard 2D TI models exhibit equivalent features. The analysis is based on the local Chern marker (LCM), a local quantity that allows for the characterization of topological transitions in finite and disordered systems. Our simulations indicate that disorder-driven trivial to topological insulator transitions are nicely characterized by C0{\mathcal{C}}_{0}C0​, the disorder-averaged LCM near the central cell of the system. We show that C0{\mathcal{C}}_{0}C0​ is characterized by a single-parameter scaling, namely, ${\mathcal{C}}_{0}(M,W,L)\ensuremath{\equiv}{\mathcal{C}}_{0}(z)$, with $z=[{W}^{\ensuremath{\mu}}\ensuremath{-}{W}_{c}^{\ensuremath{\mu}}(M)]L$, where MMM is the Dirac mass, WWW is the disorder strength, and LLL is the system size, while ${W}_{c}(M)\ensuremath{\propto}\sqrt{M}$ and $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\approx}2$ stand for the critical disorder strength and the critical exponent, respectively. Our numerical results are in agreement with a theoretical prediction based on a first-order Born approximation analysis. These observations lead us to speculate that the universal scaling function we have found is rather general for amorphous and disorder-driven topological phase transitions.
We investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the spinless Haldane-Hubbard model in the presence of quenched disorder, contrasting results obtained from both exact diagonalization and the density matrix renormalization group, applied to a honeycomb cylinder. The interplay of disorder, interactions, and topology gives rise to a rich phase diagram and, in particular, highlights the possibility of a disorder-driven trivial-to-topological transition in the presence of finite interactions. That is, the topological Anderson insulator, demonstrated in noninteracting settings, is shown to be stable in the presence of sufficiently small interactions before a charge density wave Mott insulator sets in. We further promote a finite-size analysis of the transition to the ordered state in the presence of disorder, finding a mixed character of first- and second-order transitions in finite lattices, tied to the specific conditions of disorder realizations and boundary conditions used.
We study topological insulators under dephasing noise. With examples of both a 2d2d2d Chern insulator and a 3d3d3d topological insulator protected by time-reversal symmetry, we demonstrate that there is a phase transition at finite dephasing strength between phases with nontrivial and trivial topological indices. Here, the topological index is defined through the correlation matrix. The transition can be diagnosed through the spectrum of the whole correlation matrix or of a local subsystem. Interestingly, even if the topological insulator is very close to the topological-trivial critical point in its Hamiltonian, it still takes finite strength of dephasing to change the topological index, suggesting the robustness of topological insulators under dephasing. We further consider Chern insulators in the presence of real-space disorder, which exhibit a ground-state transition between topological and Anderson insulating phases. We find that even strongly disordered Chern insulators, close to the critical disorder strength, exhibit robustness with respect to dephasing.
We study the half-filled Haldane model with Anderson and binary disorder and determine its phase diagram, as a function of the Haldane flux and staggered sub-lattice potential, for increasing disorder strength. We establish that disorder stabilizes topologically nontrivial phases in regions of the phase diagram where the clean limit is topologically trivial. At small disorder strength, our results agree with analytical predictions obtained using a first order self-consistent Born approximation, and extend to the intermediate and large disorder values where this perturbative approach fails. We further characterize the phases according to their gapless or gapped nature by determining the spectral weight at the Fermi level. We find that gapless topological nontrivial phases are supported for both Anderson and binary disorder. In the binary case, we find a reentrant topological phase where, starting from a trivial region, a topological transition occurs for increasing staggered potential ηηη, followed by a second topological transition to the trivial phase for higher values of ηηη.
Topological states of matter in disordered systems without translation symmetry have attracted great interest in recent years. These states with topological characters are not only robust against certain disorders, but also can be counterintuitively induced by disorders from a topologically trivial phase in the clean limit. In this review, we summarize the current theoretical and experimental progress on disorder-induced topological phases in both condensed-matter and artificial systems. We first introduce the topological Anderson insulators (TAIs) induced by random disorders and their topological characterizations and experimental realizations. We then discuss various extensions of TAIs with unique localization phenomena in quasiperiodic and non-Hermitian systems. We also review the theoretical and experimental studies on the disorder-induced topology in dynamical and many-body systems, including topological Anderson-Thouless pumps, disordered correlated topological insulators and average-symmetry protected topological orders acting as interacting TAI phases. Finally, we conclude the review by highlighting potential directions for future explorations.