Charged shells and elementary particles

Abstract

We review the General Relativistic model of a (quasi) point-like particle represented by a massive shell of electrically charged matter, which displays an ADM mass M equal to the electric charge |Q| in the small-volume limit. We employ the Israel-Darboux's junction equations to explicitly derive this result, and then study the modifications introduced by the existence of a minimum length scale lambda. For lambda of the order of the Planck length (or larger), we find that the ADM mass becomes equal to the bare mass m_0 of the shell, like it occurs for the neutral case.