Radiation reaction and the acceleration-dependent mass increase of a charged sphere undergoing uniform acceleration

Abstract

Photon emission from a uniformly accelerated charge is among the most mysterious physical phenomena. Theories based on the Lorentz-Abraham-Dirac equation mostly conclude that a uniformly accelerated point charge cannot feel radiation reaction. Such a conclusion suggests that the origin of the photon energy is unclear. In this paper, we determine the self-force of a uniformly accelerated charged sphere using the Lorentz force equation, with an assumption that the sphere is Lorentz-contracted during the acceleration. For large acceleration, the calculated self-force converges to the radiation reaction (given by the Larmor formula) via a new factor ${\gamma }_a$, which describes an acceleration-dependent increase in the effective mass. This increased mass makes it harder to accelerate the particle (compared to a point-charge), which means more energy should be provided to the particle in order to get the expected acceleration. This extra energy can be interpreted as the origin of the photon energy.

9 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (2)

• Aspects of electromagnetic radiation reaction in strong fields
• The Fields of a Charged Particle in Hyperbolic Motion

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Self-force on a charged particle in an external scalar field