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.
Itinerant electrons in a two-dimensional Kagome lattice form a Dirac semi-metal, similar to graphene. When lattice and spin symmetries are broken by various periodic perturbations this semi-metal is shown to spawn interesting non-magnetic insulating
phases. These include a two-dimensional topological insulator with a non-trivial Z_2 invariant and robust gapless edge states, as well as dimerized and trimerized `Kekule insulators. The latter two are topologically trivial but the Kekule phase possesses a complex order parameter with fractionally charged vortex excitations. A charge density wave is shown to couple to the Dirac fermions as an effective axial gauge field.
