The point-charge self-energy in a nonminimal Lorentz-violating Maxwell electrodynamics

¹ UNESP, Campus de Guaratinguetá, DFQ - Avenida Dr. Ariberto Pereira da Cunha 333, CEP 12516-410, Guaratinguetá, SP, Brazil
² IFQ, Universidade Federal de Itajubá - Av. BPS 1303, Pinheirinho, Caixa Postal 50, 37500-903, Itajubá, MG, Brazil
³ Universidade Federal do ABC, UFABC - Avenida dos Estados, 5001, Santo André, SP, 09210-580, Brazil
⁴ Indiana University Center for Spacetime Symmetries, Indiana University - Bloomington, IN, 47405-7105, USA

Received: 23 March 2018
Accepted: 1 June 2018

Abstract

In this letter we study the self-energy of a point-like charge for the electromagnetic field in a non-minimal Lorentz symmetry breaking scenario in a -dimensional space time. We consider two variations of a model where the Lorentz violation is caused by a background vector that appears in a higher derivative interaction. We restrict our attention to the case where is a time-like background vector, namely , and we verify that the classical self-energy is finite for any odd spatial dimension n and diverges for even n. We also make some comments regarding obstacles in the quantization of the proposed model.