22 research outputs found
Constraints on the Lepton Charge, Spin and Mass from Quasi-Local Energy
The masses of the elementary particles as well as their charges and spins
(herein expressed in terms of the elementary charge and Planck's constant,
respectively) belong to the fundamental physical constants. Presently, no
fundamental theory describing them is available, so their values remain
mysterious. In this work we offer an approach based on the Brown-York
quasi-local energy which includes the self-energy of an object. In order to
compute this energy we model the spacetime of the renormalized electron (and
other leptons) by the Kerr-Newman metric. Placing conditions on the associated
energies at different radii we arrive at various constraints on the mass,
charge and spin.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur
Extracting Dynamical Degrees of Freedom From the Quasilocal Energy Term in the Gravitational Action
It is shown that under proper conditions in an appropriate coordinate system
with a suitable time slicing the Einstein-Hilbert action including all
necessary boundary terms can be written in terms of the Brown-York quasilocal
energy in the absence of matter. If matter is present the non-vanishing bulk
term only consists of terms involving the stress-energy tensor. It is argued
that the dynamical content of general relativity is stored in the quasilocal
energy term. As an example we compute the relevant terms for a modified Vaidya
metric which may be used in the investigation of black hole radiance. The bulk
term vanishes in the Eddington-Finkelstein kind of coordinate system we use as
our preferred gauge with the exception of possible contributions from the
stress-energy tensor. Whereas the boundary terms alone are sufficient to cancel
second derivatives in the action the presented gauge gives a surface integral
of first derivative terms which may be desirable for a quantization of the
action, but it is possibly absorbed by the stress-energy contribution to the
bulk term.Comment: 6 page