Aharonov-Bohm effect and high-velocity estimates of solutions to the Schrödinger equation (Q533646)

Aharonov and Bohm raised the question whether electromagnetic potentials can lead to experimental consequences depending on the potentials directly, and not merely on the electromagnetic field tensor. \textit{Y. Aharonov} and \textit{D. Bohm} [``Significance of electromagnetic potentials in the quantum theory, Phys. Rev., II. Ser. 115, 485--491 (1959; Zbl 0099.43102)] have proposed an approximate solution to the Schrödinger equation over simply connected regions where the magnetic field is zero, by a change in gauge formula from the zero vector potential. In the paper under review, the authors estimate the error bound for the difference in norm between the exact solution and the Aharonov-Bohm ansatz. In a previous paper [``High-velocity estimates for the scattering operator and Aharonov-Bohm effect in three dimensions'', Commun. Math. Phys. 285, No. 1, 345--398 (2009)], the authors have presented a rigorous mathematical analysis of the scattering of particles moving in the complement \(\Lambda\) of a bounded obstacle \(K\), whose connected components are handlebodies under the effect of an external electromagnetic field in \(\Lambda\) and of magnetic fluxes enclosed in \(K\). It is proved that the results do not depend on the particular geometry of magnets and the velocities of the incoming electrons used in the experiments, and the gaussian shape of the wave packets. A general class of magnets that are a finite union of handlebodies, each diffeomorphic to a torus or a ball, was considered. The errors were found to be quite small, particularly for electron wave packets with variances of intermediate sizes [\textit{M. Ballesteros} and \textit{R. Weder}, J. Math. Phys. 50, No. 12, Paper No. 122108, 54 p. (2009; Zbl 1317.81093)]. The error bound in norm is uniform in time and decays as a constant divided by \(v^{\rho}\), \(0<\rho<1\), where \(v\) is the nonrelativistic velocity. The conclusion is that the magnetic fields act at a distance on charged particles and this action is carried by the circulation of the magnetic potential which gives a detectable meaning to the magnetic potentials.