Phase structure of the topological Anderson insulator

We study the disordered topological Anderson insulator in a two-dimensional (square not strip) geometry. We first report the phase diagram of finite systems and then study the evolution of phase boundaries when the system size is increased to a very large 1120 x 1120 area. We establish that conductance quantization can occur without a bulk band gap, and that there are two distinct scaling regions with quantized conductance: TAI-I with a bulk band gap, and TAI-II with localized bulk states. We show that there is no intervening insulating phase between the bulk conduction phase and the TAI-I and TAI-II scaling regions, and that there is no metallic phase at the transition between the quantized and insulating phases. Centered near the quantized-insulating transition there are very broad peaks in the eigenstate size and fractal dimension d(2); in a large portion of the conductance plateau eigenstates grow when the disorder strength is increased. The fractal dimension at the peak maximum is d(2) approximate to 1.5. Effective-medium theory (Coherent Potential Approximation, self-consistent Born approximation) predicts well the boundaries and interior of the gapped TAI-I scaling region, but fails to predict all boundaries save one of the ungapped TAI-II scaling region. We report conductance distributions near several phase transitions and compare them with critical conductance distributions for well-known models.