Observation of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect in Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics
Abstract
We report the results of an experimental study of an analog of the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect achieved with the hydrodynamic pilot-wave system. A walking droplet is confined to an annular cavity that encircles a shielded vortex, but lies outside its range of direct influence. While there is no vortex-induced flow in the immediate vicinity of the droplets, the vortex modifies the droplet's spatially extended pilot-wave field that guides its motion, producing a vortex-dependent bias in the droplet's orbital speed. High-speed tracking and delay-embedding reconstructions yield Wigner-like phase-space distributions for this hydrodynamic system that exhibits a rigid, flux-dependent translation, providing a force-free, gauge-like realization of an AB-type phase.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.21263,
title = {Observation of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect in Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics},
author = {Georgi Gary Rozenman and Kyle I. McKee and Arnaud Lazarus and Valeri Frumkin and John W M Bush},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.21263},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
12 pages, 4 figures