Published June 15, 2002 | public
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Mass loss by a scalar charge in an expandin universe

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Abstract

We study the phenomenon of mass loss by a scalar charge—a point particle that acts as a source for a noninteracting scalar field—in an expanding universe. The charge is placed on comoving world lines of two cosmological spacetimes: a de Sitter universe, and a spatially flat, matter-dominated universe. In both cases, we find that the particle's rest mass is not a constant, but that it changes in response to the emission of monopole scalar radiation by the particle. In de Sitter spacetime, the particle radiates all of its mass within a finite proper time. In the matter-dominated cosmology, this happens only if the charge of the particle is sufficiently large; for smaller charges the particle first loses some of its mass, but then regains it all eventually.

Additional Information

©2002 The American Physical Society. Received 7 January 2002; published 23 May 2002. Our result for the retarded Green's function of a scalar field in de Sitter spacetime, and the realization that scalar charges in de Sitter spacetime must have a variable mass, were arrived at independently by Amos Ori [17]. We thank him for discussions, as well as Karel Kuchař, Lee Lindblom, and Kip Thorne. L.M.B. wishes to thank the Technion Institute of Theoretical Physics for hospitality. E.P. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada). A.I.H. was supported by SURF. L.M.B. was supported by NSF grants PHY-0099568 (Caltech) and PHY-9734871 (University of Utah).

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