<< One of the boons of topological insulators is that their conducting edge states are protected from disorder in the material’s structure. Turn up the disorder too much, however, and these topological features are usually lost. In 2018, experiments demonstrated the opposite behavior: in so-called topological Anderson insulators (TAIs), the addition of disorder can generate protected edge states, turning a trivial insulator into a topological one. Now, a team (..) reports a new type of TAI realized in a photonic crystal. Their experiments show that the crystal exhibits a wealth of topological phenomena that hadn’t been seen previously. >>
Matteo Rini. Let Disorder Dictate Topology. Physics 13, s123. Sep 24, 2020.
AA << directly observe the disorder-induced topological phase transition from a trivial insulator to a TAI with robust chiral edge states. (They) also demonstrate topological heterostructures that host edge states at interfaces between domains with different disorder parameters. >>
Gui-Geng Liu, Yihao Yang, et al. Topological Anderson Insulator in Disordered Photonic Crystals. Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 133603. Sep 24, 2020.
