The Electric Aharonov-Bohm Effect

TL;DR

This paper provides a rigorous mathematical proof that quantum mechanics predicts the electric Aharonov-Bohm effect, confirming the theoretical basis for its existence and encouraging experimental verification.

Contribution

It offers the first rigorous proof that the Aharonov-Bohm Ansatz accurately describes the electric effect in quantum mechanics with quantifiable error bounds.

Findings

Proves the Aharonov-Bohm Ansatz is valid up to a decaying error bound.

Demonstrates the existence of the electric Aharonov-Bohm effect in quantum theory.

Provides conditions under which the effect is predicted to occur.

Abstract

In their seminal paper Aharonov and Bohm (1959) claimed that electromagnetic fields can act at a distance on charged particles even if they are identically zero in the region of space where the particles propagate. They proposed two experiments to verify their theoretical conclusions. The magnetic effect, that has been extensively studied, and the electric effect where an electron is affected by a time-dependent electric potential that is constant in the region where the electron is propagating, i.e., such that the electric field vanishes along its trajectory. The Aharonov-Bohm effects imply such a strong departure from the physical intuition coming from classical physics that it is no wonder that they remain a highly controversial issue, after more than fifty years. The existence of electric Aharonov-Bohm effect, that has not been confirmed experimentally, is a very controversial issue. In their 1959 paper Aharonov and Bohm proposed an Ansatz for the solution to the Schroedinger equation in regions where there is a time-dependent electric potential that is constant in space. It consists in multiplying the free evolution by a phase given by the integral in time of the potential. The validity of this Ansatz predicts interference fringes between parts of a coherent electron beam that are subjected to different potentials. In this paper we prove that the exact solution to the Schroedinger equation is given by the Aharonov-Bohm Ansatz up to an error bound in norm that is uniform in time and that decays as a constant divided by the velocity. Our results give, for the first time, a rigorous proof that quantum mechanics predicts the existence of the electric Aharonov-Bohm effect, under conditions that we provide. We hope that our results will estimulate the experimental research on the electric Aharonov-Bohm effect.