Static self-forces in a five-dimensional black hole spacetime

Abstract

We obtain the electric field and scalar field for a static point charge in closed form in the 5D Schwarzschild-Tangherlini black hole spacetime. We then compute the static self-force in each of these cases by assuming that the appropriate singular field is a 4D Hadamard Green's function on the constant time Riemannian slice. It is well-known that the Hadamard representation of a Green's function involves an arbitrary regular biscalar W0(x,x′), whose coincidence limit w(x) appears in the expression for the self-force. We develop an axiomatic approach to reduce this arbitrary function to a single arbitrary dimensionless coefficient. We show that in the context of this approach to regularization, the self-force does not depend on any undetermined length scale and need not depend on the internal structure of the charge.