Disorder-induced topological phase transitions on Lieb lattices

Motivated by the very recent experimental realization of electronic Lieb lattices and research interest on topological states of matter, we study the topological phase transitions driven by Anderson-type disorder on spin-orbit coupled Lieb lattices in the presence of spin-independent and -dependent staggered potentials. By combining the recursive Green's-function and self-consistent Born approximation methods, we found that both time-reversal-invariant and time-reversal-symmetry-broken spin-orbit coupled Lieb lattice systems can host the disorder-induced gapful topological phases, including the quantum spin Hall insulator (QSHI) and quantum anomalous Hall insulator (QAHI) phases. For the time-reversal-invariant case, the disorder induces a topological phase transition directly from a normal insulator (NI) to the QSHI, while for the time-reversal-symmetry-broken case, the disorder can induce either a QAHI-QSHI phase transition or a NI-QAHI-QSHI phase transition, depending on the initial state of the system. Remarkably, the time-reversal-symmetry-broken QSHI phase can be induced by Anderson-type disorder on the spin-orbit coupled Lieb lattices without time-reversal symmetry.