The self-force on moving charges in Schwarzschild spacetime: an intuitive approach

Over 50 years ago, in a classic paper, DeWitt and Brehme showed how the fields produced by a charged particle moving in a curved spacetime backreact on the charge and produce forces that cause the particle to deviate from geodesic motion.  They gave a picturesque description of these forces: the fields emitted by the particle bounce off the curvature of spacetime, return, and interact with the charge, thereby producing the force.  The most striking feature of their solution is that -- unlike the similar problem in flat spacetime -- the force at any given instant depends on the integrated past motion of the charge.  In recent years, there has been considerable progress in computing the motion of charges (or small masses) moving in a blackhole spacetime, but these calculations have used a mode-sum technique and therefore do not explicitly display the physical origins of the forces that DeWitt and Brehme described. I will present a method of calculation that restores this intuitive feature of the forces on charges in blackhole spacetimes.