Radiation Reaction as a Non-conservative Force

Abstract

We study a system of a finite size charged particle interacting with radiation field by exploiting the Hamilton's principle for non-conservative system introduced recently by Galley[1]. The said formulation leads to the equation of motion of the charged particle that turns out to be the same as obtained by Jackson[3]. We show that radiation reaction stems from the non-conservative piece of the effective Lagrangian. We notice that a charge interacting with radiation field modeled as heat bath affords a way to justify that radiation reaction is a non-conservative force. The topic is suitable for graduate courses on advanced electrodynamics and classical theory of fields.