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Philosophy of Science

Nonlocality and the Aharonov-Bohm Effect

Richard Healey

Published Mar 1, 1997• 75 citations
Publisher

Abstract

At first sight the Aharonov-Bohm effect appears nonlocal, though not in the way EPR/ Bell correlations are generally acknowledged to be nonlocal. This paper applies an analysis of nonlocality to the Aharonov-Bohm effect to show that its peculiarities may be blamed either on a failure of a principle of local action or on a failure of a principle of separability. Different interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree on how blame should be allocated. The parallel between the Aharonov-Bohm effect and violations of Bell inequalities turns out to be so close that a balanced assessment of the nature and significance of quantum nonlocality requires a detailed study of both effects.

DOI
10.1086/392534

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At first sight the Aharonov-Bohm effect appears nonlocal, though not in the way EPR/ Bell correlations are generally acknowledged to be nonlocal. This paper applies an analysis of nonlocality to the Aharonov-Bohm effect to show that its peculiarities may be blamed either on a failure of a principle of local action or on a failure of a principle of separability. Different interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree on how blame should be allocated. The parallel between the Aharonov-Bohm effect and violations of Bell inequalities turns out to be so close that a balanced assessment of the nature and significance of quantum nonlocality requires a detailed study of both effects.
Quantum mechanics predicted the Aharonov-Bohm effect and violations of Bell inequalities before either phenomenon was experimentally verified. It is now commonly taken to explain both phenomena. Maudlin has pointed out significant disanalogies between these phenomena. But he has failed to appreciate the striking analogy that emerges when one examines the structure of their quantum mechanical explanations. The fact that each may be explained quantum mechanically in terms of a locally-acting, but nonseparable process suggests that the lesson of quantum nonlocality may be that while there is no action at a distance, the world is nonseparable.
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.
Quantum mechanics and relativistic causality together imply nonlocality: nonlocal correlations (that violate the CHSH inequality) and nonlocal equations of motion (the Aharonov-Bohm effect). Can we invert the logical order? We consider a conjecture that nonlocality and relativistic causality together imply quantum mechanics. We show that correlations preserving relativistic causality can violate the CHSH inequality more strongly than quantum correlations. Also, we describe nonlocal equations of motion, preserving relativistic causality, that do not arise in quantum mechanics. In these nonlocal equations of motion, an experimenter ``jams" nonlocal correlations between quantum systems.
Although the Aharonov-Bohm and related effects are familiar in solid-state and high-energy physics, the nonlocality of these effects has been questioned. Here we show that the Aharonov-Bohm effect has two very different aspects. One aspect is instantaneous and nonlocal; the other aspect, which depends on entanglement, unfolds continuously over time. While local, gauge-invariant variables may occasionally suffice for explaining the continuous aspect, we argue that they cannot explain the instantaneous aspect. Thus the Aharonov-Bohm effect is, in general, nonlocal.
Abstract One of the Bell’s assumptions in the original derivation of his inequalities was the hypothesis of locality, i.e., the absence of the influence of two remote measuring instruments on one another. That is why violations of these inequalities observed in experiments are often interpreted as a manifestation of the nonlocal nature of quantum mechanics, or a refutation of a local realism. It is well known that the Bell’s inequality was derived in its traditional form, without resorting to the hypothesis of locality and without the introduction of hidden variables, the only assumption being that the probability distributions are nonnegative. This can therefore be regarded as a rigorous proof that the hypothesis of locality and the hypothesis of existence of the hidden variables not relevant to violations of Bell’s inequalities. The physical meaning of the obtained results is examined. Physical nature of the violation of the Bell inequalities is explained under new EPR-B nonlocality postulate. We show that the correlations of the observables involved in the Bohm–Bell type experiments can be expressed as correlations of classical random variables. The revisited Bell type inequality in canonical notatons reads 〈AB〉 + 〈A’B〉 + 〈AB’〉 − 〈A’B’〉 ⩽ 6.