Criticality and Quench Dynamics at the Anderson Transition of a Chern Insulator
Lara Ulčakar, Jernej Mravlje, G. Lemut +1 more
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.
arXiv:2606.03426•Jun 2, 2026•0 citations