Topological protection of perturbed edge states

Understand

This paper proposes a quantitative description of the low energy edge states at the interface between two-dimensional topological insulators.

• They are modeled by continuous Hamiltonians as systems of Dirac equations that are amenable to a large class of random perturbations.
• We consider general as well as fermionic time reversal symmetric models.
• In the former case, Hamiltonians are classified using the index of a Fredholm operator.