A What is the geometry of a gauge potential in the A-B experiment?

  • A
  • Thread starter Thread starter Anko
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Geometry
Anko
Messages
32
Reaction score
3
TL;DR Summary
Aharonov-Bohm effect
Hi, this is a question about an article in the Scientific American magazine.

In 1981 Bernstein and Phillips wrote an article about fiber bundles and quantum fields, and I believe it's still a useful reference, the kind of thing lecturers would use at university.

Anyway, my question is, how do the authors determine that the geometry of the magnetic vector potential, in the original A-B experiment, is topologically a hemisphere, and that outside the solenoid the potential is geometrically a truncated cone?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Do you have a link to the article? Concerning the geometry/topology and the AB effect a standard reference is

T. T. Wu and C. N. Yang, Concept of nonintegrable phase factors and global for-
mulation of gauge fields, Phys. Rev. D 12, 3845 (1975),
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v12/i12/p3845
 
Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. Towards the end of the first lecture for the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Olivia Lanes (Global Lead, Content and Education IBM) stated... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/quantum-entanglement-is-a-kinematic-fact-not-a-dynamical-effect/ by @RUTA
If we release an electron around a positively charged sphere, the initial state of electron is a linear combination of Hydrogen-like states. According to quantum mechanics, evolution of time would not change this initial state because the potential is time independent. However, classically we expect the electron to collide with the sphere. So, it seems that the quantum and classics predict different behaviours!

Similar threads

Replies
3
Views
3K
Replies
12
Views
3K
Replies
19
Views
3K
Replies
16
Views
10K
Replies
50
Views
9K
Back
Top