Does spacetime itself create a quantum phase shift near black holes?

The Aharonov-Bohm effect — where a charged particle acquires a phase shift from a magnetic field it never touches — is classically a lab curiosity. These authors show that curved spacetime near a black hole can generate an analogous geometric phase for a quantum wavefunction, emerging from a semiclassical treatment of the Klein-Gordon equation. If real, this links two usually separate domains: quantum interference physics and strong-field gravity.