Particle motion under the conservative piece of the self-force is Hamiltonian

Abstract

We consider the motion of a point particle in a stationary spacetime under the influence of a scalar, electromagnetic or gravitational self-force. We show that the conservative piece of the first-order self-force gives rise to Hamiltonian dynamics, and we derive an explicit expression for the Hamiltonian on phase space. Specialized to the Kerr spacetime, our result generalizes the Hamiltonian function previously obtained by Fujita et. al., which is valid only for non-resonant orbits. We discuss implications for the first law of binary black hole mechanics.