Radiation reaction in curved even-dimensional spacetime

Abstract

We develop a new method of computing radiation reaction for a point particle interacting with massless scalar and vector fields in curved space-time. It is based on the analysis of field Green's functions with both points lying on the particle world-line and does not require integration of the field stresses outside the world line as was used in the DeWitt-Brehme approach, thus leading to a substantial simplification of the problem. We start with space-time of an arbitrary dimension and show that the Hadamard expansion of the massless scalar and vector Green's functions contain only integer inverse powers of the Synge world function in even dimensions and only half-integer in the odd dimensions. The even-dimensional case then is treated in detail. We analyze divergencies, calculate higher-derivative counterterms, and find a recurrent formula for the local parts of the reaction force in neighboring dimensions. Higher-dimensional curved space counterterms are not simply the covariant generalizations of the flat ones, but contain additional curvature-dependent terms. We illustrate our formalism in four and six dimensions. In the first case we rederive the results of DeWitt-Brehme-Hobbs in a simpler way, in the second case we give a covariant generalization of the Kosyakov equation. The local part of the reaction force is found to contain a term proportional to the Riemann tensor which is absent in four dimensions.