Anderson Critical Metal Phase in Trivial States Protected by C_2zT Symmetry on Average

The joint symmetry C_2zT protects obstructed atomic insulators in 2D translational invariant magnetic materials, where electrons form molecule orbitals with charge centers away from the positions of atoms. The transitions from these states to atomic insulators have to go through an intermediate metallic phase accomplished by the emergence, evolution, and annihilation of Dirac points. We show that, under quenched weak chemical potential disorder that respects the C_2zT symmetry on average, the intermediate metallic phase remains delocalized (up to numerically accessible system sizes), where every point in a finite transition process is a scale-invariant critical metal in the thermodynamic limit. We thus refer to the delocalized metallic phase as a crystalline-symmetry-associated critical metal phase. The underlying mechanism cannot be explained by conventional localization theories, such as weak anti-localization and topological phase transition in the ten-fold way classification. Through a quantitative mapping between lattice models and network models, we find that the critical metal phase is equivalent to a quantum percolation problem with random fluxes. The criticality can hence be understood through a semi-classical percolation theory.