VARIATIONAL PRINCIPLE FOR ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING PARTICLES

A consistent relativistic theory of the classical Maxwell field intera cting with classical, charged, point-like particles, proposed in [1], is now derived from a variational principle. For this purpose a new el ectrodynamical Lagrangian based on fluxes is constructed. As a result, we obtain the action principle where i) field degrees of freedom and particle degrees of freedom are kept at the same footing, ii) contrary to the standard formulation, no infinities arise, iii) energy (Hamilt onian) is obtained from the Lagrangian via the Legendre transformation , without any need of ''adding a complete divergence''.