Fragility of the antichiral edge states under disorder

Abstract: Chiral edge states are the fingerprint of the bulk-edge correspondence in a Chern insulator. Co-propagating edge modes, known as antichiral edge states, have been predicted to occur in the so-called modified Haldane model describing a two-dimensional semi-metal with broken time reversal symmetry. These counterintuitive edge modes are argued to be immune to backscattering and extremely robust against disorder. Here, we investigate the robustness of the antichiral edge states in the presence of Anderson disorder. By analysing different localization parameters, we show that, contrary to the general belief, these edge modes are fragile against disorder, and can be easily localized. Our work provides insights to improve the transport efficiency in the burgeoning fields of antichiral topological photonics and acoustics.