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We study the effect of electrostatic disorder on the conductivity of a three-dimensional antiferromagnetic insulator (a stack of quantum anomalous Hall layers with staggered magnetization). The phase diagram contains regions where the increase of disorder first causes the appearance of surface conduction (via a topological phase transition), followed by the appearance of bulk conduction (via a metal-insulator transition). The conducting surface states are stabilized by an effective time-reversal symmetry that is broken locally by the disorder but restored on long length scales. A simple self-consistent Born approximation reliably locates the boundaries of this so-called "statistical" topological phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phase-dependent bound states (Andreev levels) of a Josephson junction can cross at the Fermi level if the superconducting ground state switches between even and odd fermion parity. The level crossing is topologically protected, in the absence of time-reversal and spin-rotation symmetry, irrespective of whether the superconductor itself is topologically trivial or not. We develop a statistical theory of these topological transitions in an N-mode quantum-dot Josephson junction by associating the Andreev level crossings with the real eigenvalues of a random non-Hermitian matrix. The number of topological transitions in a 2π phase interval scales as √N, and their spacing distribution is a hybrid of the Wigner and Poisson distributions of random-matrix theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the phase diagram of the quantum Hall effect in four-dimensional (4D) space. Unlike in 2D, in 4D there exists a metallic as well as an insulating phase, depending on the disorder strength. The critical exponent v ≈ 1.2 of the diverging localization length at the quantum Hall insulator-to-metal transition differs from the semiclassical value v = 1 of 4D Anderson transitions in the presence of time-reversal symmetry. Our numerical analysis is based on a mapping of the 4D Hamiltonian onto a 1D dynamical system, providing a route towards the experimental realization of the 4D quantum Hall effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantum kicked rotator is a periodically driven dynamical system with a metal-insulator transition. We extend the model so that it includes phase transitions between a metal and a topological insulator, in the universality class of the quantum spin Hall effect. We calculate the Z2 topological invariant using a scattering formulation that remains valid in the presence of disorder. The scaling laws at the phase transition can be studied efficiently by replacing one of the two spatial dimensions with a second incommensurate driving frequency. We find that the critical exponent does not depend on the topological invariant, in agreement with earlier independent results from the network model of the quantum spin Hall effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exists a variety of proposals to transform a conventional s-wave superconductor into a topological superconductor, supporting Majorana fermion midgap states. A necessary ingredient of these proposals is strong spin-orbit coupling. Here we propose an alternative system consisting of a one-dimensional chain of magnetic nanoparticles on a superconducting substrate. No spin-orbit coupling in the superconductor is needed. We calculate the topological quantum number of a chain of finite length, including the competing effects of disorder in the orientation of the magnetic moments and in the hopping energies, to identify the transition into the topologically nontrivial state (with Majorana fermions at the end points of the chain). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We define a class of insulators with gapless surface states protected from localization due to the statistical properties of a disordered ensemble, namely, due to the ensemble's invariance under a certain symmetry. We show that these insulators are topological, and are protected by a ℤ2 invariant. Finally, we prove that every topological insulator gives rise to an infinite number of classes of statistical topological insulators in higher dimensions. Our conclusions are confirmed by numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]