Troubles with the radiation reaction in electrodynamics
Abstract
The dynamics of a radiating charge is one of the oldest unsettled problems in classical physics. The standard Lorentz-Abraham-Dirac (LAD) equation of motion is known to suffer from several pathologies and ambiguities. This paper briefly reviews these issues, and reports on a new model that fixes these difficulties in a natural way. This model is based on a hypothesis that there is an infinitesimal time delay between action and reaction. This can be related to Feynman's regularization scheme, leading to a quasi-local QED with a natural UV cutoff, hence without the need for renormalization as the divergences are absent. Besides leading to a pathology-free equation of motion, the new model predicts a modification of the Larmor formula that is testable with current and near future ultra-intense lasers.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1610.06981,
title = {Troubles with the radiation reaction in electrodynamics},
author = {Sofiane Faci and José A. Helayel-Neto and V. H. Satheeshkumar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.06981},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6 pages. The title and Eq. 4 were slightly modified in this version. To appear in the Proceedings of Group-31 (The 31st International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics)