Lagrangian formulation of the general relativistic Poynting-Robertson effect

We propose the Lagrangian formulation for describing the motion of a test particle in a general relativistic, stationary, and axially symmetric spacetime. The test particle is also affected by a radiation field, modeled as a coherent flux of photons traveling along the null geodesics of the background spacetime, including the general relativistic Poynting-Robertson effect. The innovative part of this work is to prove the existence of the potential linked to the dissipative action caused by the Poynting-Robertson effect in general relativity through the help of an integrating factor, depending on the energy of the system. Generally, such kinds of inverse problems involving dissipative effects might not admit a Lagrangian formulation; especially, in general relativity, there are no examples of such attempts in the literature so far. We reduce this general relativistic Lagrangian formulation to the classic case in the weak-field limit. This approach facilitates further studies in improving the treatment of the radiation field, and it contains, for example, some implications for a deeper comprehension of the gravitational waves.