No Arabic abstract
We study disorder effects in a two-dimensional system with chiral symmetry and find that disorder can induce a quadrupole topological insulating phase (a higher-order topological phase with quadrupole moments) from a topologically trivial phase. Their topological properties manifest in a topological invariant defined based on effective boundary Hamiltonians, the quadrupole moment, and zero-energy corner modes. We find gapped and gapless topological phases and a Griffiths regime. In the gapless topological phase, all the states are localized, while in the Griffiths regime, the states at zero energy become multifractal. We further apply the self-consistent Born approximation to show that the induced topological phase arises from disorder renormalized masses. We finally introduce a practical experimental scheme with topoelectrical circuits where the predicted topological phenomena can be observed by impedance measurements. Our work opens the door to studying higher-order topological Anderson insulators and their localization properties.
Recently, a new family of symmetry-protected higher-order topological insulators has been proposed and was shown to host lower-dimensional boundary states. However, with the existence of the strong disorder in the bulk, the crystal symmetry is broken, and the associated corner states are disappeared. It is well known that the emergence of robust edge states and quantized transport can be induced by adding sufficient disorders into a topologically trivial insulator, that is the so-called topological Anderson insulator. The question is whether disorders can also cause the higher-order topological phase. This is not known so far, because interactions between disorders and the higher-order topological phases are completely different from those with the first-order topological system. Here, we demonstrate theoretically that the disorderinduced higher-order topological corner state and quantized fraction corner charge can appear in a modified Haldane model. In experiments, we construct the classical analog of such higherorder topological Anderson insulators using electric circuits and observe the disorder-induced corner state through the voltage measurement. Our work defies the conventional view that the disorder is detrimental to the higher-order topological phase, and offers a feasible platform to investigate the interaction between disorders and higher-order topological phases.
The disorder effects on higher-order topological phases in periodic systems have attracted much attention. However, in aperiodic systems such as quasicrystalline systems, the interplay between disorder and higher-order topology is still unclear. In this work, we investigate the effects of disorder on two types of second-order topological insulators, including a quasicrystalline quadrupole insulator and a modified quantum spin Hall insulator, in a two-dimensional Amman-Beenker tiling quasicrystalline lattice. We demonstrate that the higher-order topological insulators are robust against weak disorder in both two models. More striking, the disorder-induced higher-order topological insulators called higher-order topological Anderson insulators are found at a certain region of disorder strength in both two models. Our work extends the study of the interplay between disorder and higher-order topology to quasicrystalline systems.
Three-dimensional topological (crystalline) insulators are materials with an insulating bulk, but conducting surface states which are topologically protected by time-reversal (or spatial) symmetries. Here, we extend the notion of three-dimensional topological insulators to systems that host no gapless surface states, but exhibit topologically protected gapless hinge states. Their topological character is protected by spatio-temporal symmetries, of which we present two cases: (1) Chiral higher-order topological insulators protected by the combination of time-reversal and a four-fold rotation symmetry. Their hinge states are chiral modes and the bulk topology is $mathbb{Z}_2$-classified. (2) Helical higher-order topological insulators protected by time-reversal and mirror symmetries. Their hinge states come in Kramers pairs and the bulk topology is $mathbb{Z}$-classified. We provide the topological invariants for both cases. Furthermore we show that SnTe as well as surface-modified Bi$_2$TeI, BiSe, and BiTe are helical higher-order topological insulators and propose a realistic experimental setup to detect the hinge states.
Pursuing topological phase and matter in a variety of systems is one central issue in current physical sciences and engineering. Motivated by the recent experimental observation of corner states in acoustic and photonic structures, we theoretically study the dipolar-coupled gyration motion of magnetic solitons on the two-dimensional breathing kagome lattice. We calculate the phase diagram and predict both the Tamm-Shockley edge modes and the second-order corner states when the ratio between alternate lattice constants is greater than a critical value. We show that the emerging corner states are topologically robust against both structure defects and moderate disorders. Micromagnetic simulations are implemented to verify the theoretical predictions with an excellent agreement. Our results pave the way for investigating higher-order topological insulators based on magnetic solitons.
Conventional topological insulators support boundary states that have one dimension lower than the bulk system that hosts them, and these states are topologically protected due to quantized bulk dipole moments. Recently, higher-order topological insulators have been proposed as a way of realizing topological states that are two or more dimensions lower than the bulk, due to the quantization of bulk quadrupole or octupole moments. However, all these proposals as well as experimental realizations have been restricted to real-space dimensions. Here we construct photonic higher-order topological insulators (PHOTI) in synthetic dimensions. We show the emergence of a quadrupole PHOTI supporting topologically protected corner modes in an array of modulated photonic molecules with a synthetic frequency dimension, where each photonic molecule comprises two coupled rings. By changing the phase difference of the modulation between adjacently coupled photonic molecules, we predict a dynamical topological phase transition in the PHOTI. Furthermore, we show that the concept of synthetic dimensions can be exploited to realize even higher-order multipole moments such as a 4th order hexadecapole (16-pole) insulator, supporting 0D corner modes in a 4D hypercubic synthetic lattice that cannot be realized in real-space lattices.