Showing papers by "Harald Grosse published in 1977"

Exactly soluble system of relativistic two-body interaction

Abstract: An exactly solvable model for relativistic two-body interaction, consisting of two harmonic oscillators coupled via a massless scalar field, is studied. Elimination of the field from the dynamics of the sources by imposing boundary conditions leads to differential-difference equations for the particles. These equations can be solved to show that, in general, a solution is not uniquely determined by the initial data at some instant, but that the specification of the data on a finite time segment is necessary. In contrast to this, prescribing the field on some initial surface does lead to a normal Cauchy problem for particles and field. Further, we discuss radiation damping. For finite total energy (and physically reasonable values for the constants of the model) the system shows a dissipative behavior; any energy initially stored by the oscillators is eventually transferred to the field.