Disorder, ubiquitously present in solids, is normally detrimental to the stability of ordered states of matter. In this letter we demonstrate that not only is the physics of a strong topological insulator robust to disorder but, remarkably, under cer
tain conditions disorder can become fundamentally responsible for its existence. We show that disorder, when sufficiently strong, can transform an ordinary metal with strong spin-orbit coupling into a strong topological `Anderson insulator, a new topological phase of quantum matter in three dimensions.
We describe and analyze in detail our recent theoretical proposal for the realization and manipulation of anyons in a weakly interacting system consisting of a two-dimensional electron gas in the integer quantum Hall regime adjacent to a type-II supe
rconducting film with an artificial array of pinning sites. The anyon is realized in response to a defect in the pinned vortex lattice and carries a charge pm e/2 and a statistical angle pi/4. We establish this result, both analytically and numerically, in three complementary approaches: (i) a continuum model of two-dimensional electrons in the vortex lattice of the superconducting film; (ii) a minimal tight-binding lattice model that captures the essential features of the system; and (iii) an effective theory of the superconducting vortex lattice superposed on the integer quantum Hall state. We propose a novel method to measure the fractional charge directly in a bulk transport experiment and an all-electric setup for an ``anyon shuttle implementing the braiding operations. We briefly discuss conditions for fabricating the system in the lab and its potential applications in quantum information processing with non-Abelian anyons.
