Numerical study of the topological Anderson insulator in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells

We study the disorder effect on the transport properties in the HgTe/CdTe semiconductor quantum wells. We confirm that at a moderate disorder strength, the initially unquantized two-terminal conductance becomes quantized and the system makes a transition to the topological Anderson insulator (TAI). Conductances calculated for the stripe and cylinder samples reveal the topological feature of TAI and supports the idea that the helical edge states may cause the anomalous quantized plateaus. The influence of disorder is studied by calculating the distributions of local currents. Based on the above-mentioned picture, the phenomena induced by disorder in the quantum spin-Hall region and TAI region are directly explained. Our study of the local-current configurations shed further light on the mechanism of the anomalous plateau.