Correlated disorder-induced anomalous transport in time-reversal symmetry breaking topological insulator*

Much having explored in the area of random uncorrelated disorder driven topological phase transitions (TPTs), we uncover that the topological Anderson insulator (TAI) phases can be induced by correlated disorder in magnetically doped topological insulator thin film. We undergo a large scale transport simulation to compute the conductance through a central disordered  region coupled to reservoirs in the quantum spin Hall (QSH) regime. The quasi-periodic nature of the potential allows us to explore rich phase diagrams, consisting of normal insulator, quantum anomalous Hall (QAH),  quantum spin Chern (QSC), QSH and AI phases, in terms of magnetic exchange field, the Fermi level, and the initial non-topological/ topological phase, for its various orientations in the two-dimensional plane. For isotropic quasi-periodic potential and correlated disorder, we find quantized conductance from extended bulk bands before entering into  QAH and QSC phases. We obtain uninterrupted edge transport for transverse quasi-periodicity as well as correlated disorder while re-entrant QAH phase exists (vanishes) for longitudinal quasi-periodicity (correlated disorder) in the moderate amplitude.  We successfully explain the TPTs by the renormalized negative mass via the self consistent Born approximation.