A small body moving in the field of a much larger black hole and subjected to its own gravity moves on an accelerated world line in the background spacetime of the large black hole. The acceleration is produced by the body's gravitational self-force, which is constructed from the body's retarded gravitational field. The adiabatic approximation to the gravitational self-force is obtained instead from the half-retarded minus half-advanced field. It is much easier to compute, and it is known to produce the same dissipative effects as the true self-force. We argue that the adiabatic approximation is limited, because it discards important conservative terms which lead to the secular evolution of some orbital elements. We argue further that this secular evolution has measurable consequences; in particular, it affects the phasing of the orbit and the phasing of the associated gravitational wave. Our argument rests on a simple toy model involving a point electric charge moving slowly in the weak gravitational field of a central mass; the charge is also subjected to its electromagnetic self-force. In this simple context the true self-force is known explicitly and it can cleanly be separated into conservative and radiation-reaction pieces. Its long-term effect on the particle's orbital elements can be fully determined. In this model we observe that the conservative part of the self-force produces a secular regression of the orbit's periapsis. We explain how the conclusions reached on the basis of the toy model can be extended to the gravitational self-force, and we attempt to extend them also to the case of rapid motions and strong fields. While the limitations of the adiabatic approximation are quite severe in a post-Newtonian context in which the motion is slow and the gravitational field weak, they may be less severe for rapid motions and strong fields.

We compute the electromagnetic self-force acting on a charged particle held in place at a fixed position r outside a five-dimensional black hole described by the Schwarzschild-Tangherlini metric. Using a spherical-harmonic decomposition of the electrostatic potential and a regularization prescription based on the Hadamard Green's function, we express the self-force as a convergent mode sum. The self-force is first evaluated numerically, and next presented as an analytical expansion in powers of R/r, with R denoting the event-horizon radius. The power series is then summed to yield a closed-form expression. Unlike its four-dimensional version, the self-force features a dependence on a regularization parameter s that can be interpreted as the particle's radius. The self-force is repulsive at large distances, and its behavior is related to a model according to which the force results from a gravitational interaction between the black hole and the distribution of electrostatic field energy attached to the particle. The model, however, is shown to become inadequate as r becomes comparable to R, where the self-force changes sign and becomes attractive. We also calculate the self-force acting on a particle with a scalar charge, which we find to be everywhere attractive. This is to be contrasted with its four-dimensional counterpart, which vanishes at any r.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures. Major changes from previous version: the regularization procedure is now fully justified, and the singular field is shown to make a contribution to the self-forc