Radiation reaction in curved even-dimensional spacetime (Q928551)

This paper presents a purely local calculation of the radiation reaction for a point particle interacting with scalar and vector fields in a curved space-time. This approach is based on the analysis of Green functions with both points lying on the world line of the particle for arbitrary dimension greater than or equal to 4 of the space-time. It neglects the scattering of radiation on the curvature of the vicinity and avoids integral terms in the arising expressions that are difficult physically to exploit. After renormalizing divergent terms by adding higher-derivative counter terms (which are shown to be not simply covariant generalizations of the flat-space-time ones) the authors find a recurrent formula for the local part of the reaction force. For four dimensions, this formula recovers the DeWitt-Brehme-Hobbs results in a simpler way; in the six-dimensional case, it gives a covariant generalization of the Kosyakov equation.