Disorder-induced delocalization and reentrance in a Hopf-Chern insulator

The Hopf-Chern insulator is an unconventional three-dimensional topological insulator with a bulk gap and gapless boundary states without protection from global discrete symmetries. This study investigates its fate in the presence of local magnetic and charge impurities. We find it stable up to moderate disorder values by analyzing the surface states and the zero energy bulk density of states using large-scale numerical simulation and the self-consistent Born approximation. The disordered Hopf-Chern insulator shows reentrant behavior: the disorder initially expands the topological phase before driving it across an insulator-diffusive metal transition. We examine the associated critical exponents via finite-size scaling of the bulk density of states, participation entropy, and two-terminal conductance. We estimate the correlation length exponent $\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\simeq}1.0(1)$, consistent with the clean two-dimensional Chern universality and distinct from the integer quantum Hall exponent.