Orbital Magnetic Field-Induced Reversal of Quantized Hall Plateaus through Berry Curvature evolutions

The quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect, a condensed matter analog of the parity anomaly, has been shown to exhibit parity anomaly signatures under the influence of orbital fields in recent studies. While previous investigations primarily focused on clean QAH systems, our work extends these efforts to disordered environments, where the interplay between Berry curvature evolution and Anderson localization unveils rich new physics. We uncover a striking reversal of the QAH plateau induced solely by enhancing the orbital field, which arises from the asymmetric shift of disorder-induced Berry curvature monopoles in energy space, breaking particle-hole symmetry. This asymmetry is traced back to the evolution of critical points associated with Anderson transitions. Finally, we construct the phase diagram of this disordered system under the orbital field and propose experimental routines to distinguish the quantized Hall plateau reversal caused by orbital field effects from that caused by the switching of the magnetization. This demonstrates the experimental feasibility of our theoretical prediction. Our work study highlights the critical role of disorder in shaping topological responses associated with parity anomaly.