Deflating the Aharonov-Bohm Effect

Abstract

I argue that the metaphysical import of the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been overstated: correctly understood, it does not require either rejection of gauge invariance or any novel form of nonlocality. The conclusion that it does require one or the other follows from a failure to keep track, in the analysis, of the complex scalar field to which the magnetic vector potential is coupled. Once this is recognised, the way is clear to a local account of the ontology of electrodynamics (or at least, to an account no more nonlocal than quantum theory in general requires); I sketch a possible such account.

References in corpus (1)

• Causality, particle localization and positivity of the energy

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Gauge Symmetries, Symmetry Breaking, and Gauge-Invariant Approaches
• Note on the bundle geometry of field space, variational connections, the dressing field method, & presymplectic structures of gauge theories over bounded regions
• The role of representational conventions in assessing the empirical significance of symmetries