Geometric phase of the gyromotion for charged particles in a time-dependent magnetic field

We study the dynamics of the gyrophase of a charged particle in a magnetic field which is uniform in space but changes slowly with time. As the magnetic field evolves slowly with time, the changing of the gyrophase is composed of two parts. The first part is the dynamical phase, which is the time integral of the instantaneous gyrofrequency. The second part, called geometric gyrophase, is more interesting, and it is an example of the geometric phase which has found many important applications in different branches of physics. If the magnetic field returns to the initial value after a loop in the parameter space, then the geometric gyrophase equals the solid angle spanned by the loop in the parameter space. This classical geometric gyrophase is compared with the geometric phase (the Berry phase) of the spin wave function of an electron placed in the same adiabatically changing magnetic field. Even though gyromotion is not the classical counterpart of the quantum spin, the similarities between the geometric phases of the two cases nevertheless reveal the similar geometric nature of the different physics laws governing these two physics phenomena. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3609830]