Extra Seminar - Würzburg ToCoTronics Colloquium

Chern insulators are a rare example of two-dimensional systems that become Anderson localized at a finite value of disorder due to the topological protection. This protection provides a unique route to studying quenches across a genuine Anderson transition, a regime that is otherwise inaccessible due to computational complexity of three-dimensional systems, and due to localization at infinitesima disorder in lower dimensions. We demonstrate that the topological Anderson transition is characterized by a finite electrical conductance and by the emergence of a critical length scale in the real-space profile of the local Chern marker. We extract the correlation-length an dynamical critical exponents, which are consistent with those of noninteracting models for the integer quantum Hall effect. We then investigate finite-time quenches of the disorder strength across the Anderson transition. In contrast to clean topological phase transitions, we find that neither the excitation density nor the nonequilibrium length scale encoded in the local Chern marker obey Kibble-Zurek scaling.