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Abstract

A relativistic dynamics describing a massless particle acted upon by an arbitrary external force is formulated. It turns out that for conservative and central forces, the obtained “massless” equations of motion, are completely integrable. For the value of the helicity equal to zero, hamiltonian flows on the twistor phase space T are constructed which, for conservative forces, reproduce the “massless” equations of motion. A possible generalization of the hamiltonian formalism which is valid for non-vanishing values of the helicity shows that such massless spinning particles should be regarded as one-dimensional extended objects.

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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Bette, A. (1994). Hamiltonian Dynamics of Massless Objects. In: Antoine, JP., Ali, S.T., Lisiecki, W., Mladenov, I.M., Odzijewicz, A. (eds) Quantization and Infinite-Dimensional Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2564-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2564-6_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-6095-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-2564-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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