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On the significance of radiation reaction

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Abstract

Radiation reaction has been a topic in physics for more than a century. The lack of a complete and consistent treatment in classical electrodynamics, and the appearance of unphysical solutions, has often postponed the discussion of reactive effects of radiation to late chapters in textbooks, with comprehensive discussion usually reserved for advanced texts. As a result, radiation reaction may appear to some mainly as a curiosity. This modest focus is in stark contrast to the fact that radiation reaction played a crucial role when Niels Bohr arrived at his postulates that became part of the foundation of quantum mechanics, and that it determines the collapse of binary astrophysical systems as well as the deceleration of high-energy electrons that penetrate matter. We discuss these cases and show how, for ultra-relativistic electrons penetrating single crystals, we have been able to achieve the at first glance bizarre scenario where the reaction force is many times greater than the interaction force between the electron and the crystal without which no radiation would appear.

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Data Availability Statement

This manuscript has associated data in a data repository. [Authors comment: The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. This manuscript has no associated data or the data will not be deposited.]

Notes

  1. In electrodynamics mass solely appears in Newton’s second law (inertial mass). In gravity mass appears both in Newton’s second law (inertial mass), as the constant of proportionality between force and acceleration, and in force itself (the gravitational mass). Hence, the Larmor formula for radiation in non-relativistic electrodynamics contains no mass, whereas the gravitational analog for a binary system will be proportional to mass squared.

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Acknowledgements

The numerical results presented in this work were partly obtained at the Centre for Scientific Computing Aarhus (CSCAA) and with support from NVIDIA’s GPU grant program. This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant No. PHY-1535696, and PHY-2012549).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93407, USA

    R. Holtzapple

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, 8000, Aarhus, Denmark

    C. F. Nielsen, A. H. Sørensen & U. I. Uggerhøj

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  1. R. Holtzapple
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  2. C. F. Nielsen
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  3. A. H. Sørensen
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  4. U. I. Uggerhøj
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CERN NA63

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All authors contributed equally to the work presented in the paper.

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Correspondence to C. F. Nielsen.

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Holtzapple, R., Nielsen, C.F., Sørensen, A.H. et al. On the significance of radiation reaction. Eur. Phys. J. D 76, 167 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-022-00496-2

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