Relativistic Lagrangians for the Lorentz-Dirac equation

Abstract

We present two types of relativistic Lagrangians for the Lorentz-Dirac equation written in terms of an arbitrary world-line parameter. One of the Lagrangians contains an exponential damping function of the proper time and explicitly depends on the world-line parameter. Another Lagrangian includes additional cross-terms consisting of auxiliary dynamical variables and does not depend explicitly on the world-line parameter. We demonstrate that both the Lagrangians actually yield the Lorentz-Dirac equation with a source-like term.

16 pages, a gauge transformation is considered, published version