Structural spillage: an efficient method to screen amorphous topological materials*

While topological phases of matter are not restricted to crystals, there is no efficient method for predicting which amorphous solids are topological. In order to enable a high-throughput screening of amorphous topological materials, it is desirable to find a computationally efficient quantity, compatible with first-principle calculations. In this work, we introduce the structural spillage, a quantity that predicts the topological state of an unknown amorphous state by comparing it to a known reference crystal. To illustrate its potential, we benchmark it using tight-binding and first-principles calculations on two-dimensional amorphous bismuth and its bilayer, showing a transition between trivial and topological phases. Our work sets the basis to predict topological amorphous solids efficiently, opening up a large material class where to explore topological phenomena.