Eric’s new paper on the topological Anderson insulator has been published in Science! He and Alex found that adding disorder to a topological system could destroy its topology, and more strangely, that adding disorder could also induce topology in a trivial system. This work was done in collaboration with and built upon work done by Ian Mondragon-Shem and Taylor Hughes here at Illinois, and also in collaboration with Alexandre Dauphin, Maria Maffei, and Pietro Massignan of ICFO in Barcelona, Spain.

The article can be accessed for free through our publications page. We also received some local press.

Artist’s depiction of a disorder-induced transition to the topological Anderson insulator phase. Image by Lachina Creative, copyright Bryce Gadway, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.