Abstract

A single electron passing through an interferometer will produce a small path-dependent change in the electromagnetic field, which causes the state of the field to become entangled with the state of the electron, as illustrated in Fig. 1, In the usual analysis of the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect,¹ the magnetic field produced by a solenoid S is treated classically and the electron is treated quantum mechanically, which neglects any effects of the entanglement. One might, instead, consider the opposite approach, in which the phase shift along a specific path is calculated by quantizing the field but treating the electron as a classical charge distribution.

© 1995 Optical Society of America