Feynman’s lecture utilizing the Aharonov–Bohm effect

Akira Tonomura

Giorgio Matteucci

Readers looking for inaccuracies in the Feynman Lectures might be interested in the misrepresentation of the quantum phase shift in the so-called magnetic Aharonov-Bohm effect in chapter 15.5 of volume two. Feynman describes the importance of the vector potential in quantum mechanics, presenting the electron interference experiment suggested by Aharonov and Bohm in his own usual fascinating way. However, the phase shift, revealed by the detector, is misrepresented in figure 15–7.

Murray Peshkin

Luiz C. L. Botelho, J C de Mello

The authors analyse the non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effect in the Feynman path integral framework generalised to pseudo-classical mechanics.

Donald H. Kobe

Qian Shang-Wu, Gu Zhi-Yu

This article shows that in Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect arrangements, the electron wave propagation space is doubly connected for two real coherent sources, and simply connected under certain condition for two virtual coherent sources, and all known AB experiments belong to the latter case. By the Feynman path integral method, we show that in the former case there is no AB effect, whereas in the latter case there is.