Experimental Observation of Higher-Order Topological Anderson Insulators

Recently, a new family of symmetry-protected higher-order topological insulators has been proposed, and was shown to host lower-dimensional boundary states. However, with the existence of the strong disorder in the bulk, the crystal symmetry is broken, and the associated corner states are disappeared. It is well known that the emergence of robust edge states and quantized transport can be induced by adding sufficient disorders into a topologically trivial insulator, that is the so-called topological Anderson insulator. The question is whether disorders can also cause the higher-order topological phase. This is not known so far, because the interaction between disorders and the higher-order topological phases is completely different from that with the first-order topological system. Here, we demonstrate theoretically that the disorder-induced higher-order topological corner state can appear in a modified Haldane model. In experiments, we construct the classical analog of such higher-order topological Anderson insulators using electric circuits, and observe the disorder-induced corner state through the voltage measurement. Our work defies the conventional view that the disorder is detrimental to the higher-order topological phase, and offers a feasible platform to investigate the interaction between disorders and the higher-order topological phases.