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  • Letter

Acoustic spin-Chern topological Anderson insulators

Hui Liu1, Boyang Xie1, Haonan Wang1, Wenwei Liu1, Zhancheng Li1, Hua Cheng1,*, Jianguo Tian1, Zhengyou Liu2,3,†, and Shuqi Chen1,4,‡

  • 1The Key Laboratory of Weak Light Nonlinear Photonics, Ministry of Education, Smart Sensing Interdisciplinary Science Center, School of Physics and TEDA Institute of Applied Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
  • 2Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro- and Nanostructures of Ministry of Education and School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
  • 3Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
  • 4The Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, Shanxi 030006, China

  • *Corresponding author: hcheng@nankai.edu.cn
  • †Corresponding author: zyliu@whu.edu.cn
  • ‡Corresponding author: schen@nankai.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. B 108, L161410 – Published 20 October, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.L161410

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in topological Anderson insulators (TAIs) have revealed the counterintuitive possibility that sufficiently strong disorder can induce nontrivial topology from a trivial phase. Previous experimental research on TAIs has mainly focused on Chern-type and higher-order systems. However, the observation of spin-Chern-type TAI hosting disorder-induced spin-dependent boundary states remains unexplored. Here, we report on the experimental realization of a spin-Chern-type TAI in a two-dimensional bilayer phononic crystal. We directly observe evidence of TAI through disorder-induced pseudospin-dependent helical boundary modes from a trivial insulator and further demonstrate their robustness. By extending topological descriptions to disordered supercells and capturing the spin-Bott index, we confirm the topological Anderson phase transition. This work opens different perspectives for the realization of interesting topological phases in optics, circuits, and cold atom systems.

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Phys. Rev. B 108, L161410– Published 20 October, 2023
  • Received 17 October 2022
  • Revised 2 October 2023
  • Accepted 5 October 2023
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