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Decoupling the electronic gap from the spin Chern number in spin-resolved topological insulators
KTH, Centres, Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics NORDITA. Stockholm Univ, S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden; Univ Connecticut, Dept Phys, Storrs, CT 06269 USA.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4265-1824
Rutgers State Univ, Ctr Mat Theory, Dept Phys & Astron, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA.
Rutgers State Univ, Ctr Mat Theory, Dept Phys & Astron, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA; Flatiron Inst, Ctr Computat Quantum Phys, 162 5th Ave, New York, NY 10010 USA.
2024 (English)In: Physical Review B, ISSN 2469-9950, E-ISSN 2469-9969, Vol. 110, no 21, article id 214211Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In two-dimensional topological insulators, a disorder-induced topological phase transition is typically identified with an Anderson localization transition at the Fermi energy. However, in Z2 trivial, spin-resolved topological insulators it is the spectral gap of the spin spectrum, in addition to the bulk mobility gap, which protects the nontrivial topology of the ground state. In this work, we show that these two gaps, the bulk electronic and spin gap, can evolve distinctly on the introduction of quenched short-ranged disorder and that an odd-quantized spin Chern number topologically protects states below the Fermi energy from localization. This decoupling leads to a unique situation in which an Anderson localization transition occurs below the Fermi energy at the topological transition. Furthermore, the presence of topologically protected extended bulk states nontrivial bulk topology typically implies the existence of protected boundary modes. We demonstrate the absence of protected boundary modes in the Hamiltonian and yet the edge modes in the eigenstates of the projected spin operator survive. Our work thus provides evidence that a nonzero spin-Chern number, in the absence of a nontrivial Z2 index, does not demand the existence of protected boundary modes at finite or zero energy.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024. Vol. 110, no 21, article id 214211
National Category
Condensed Matter Physics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-358740DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.110.214211ISI: 001389449300002Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105004591811OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-358740DiVA, id: diva2:1929689
Note

QC 20250121

Available from: 2025-01-21 Created: 2025-01-21 Last updated: 2025-05-21Bibliographically approved

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Tyner, Alexander

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