Spherically symmetric differential equations, the rotation group, and tensor spherical functions

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper a scheme is developed for handling tensor partial differential equations having spherical symmetry. The basic technique is that of Gelfand and Shapiro ((2), §8) by which tensor fields defined on a sphere give rise to scalar fields defined on the rotation group. These fields may be expanded as series of functions, where,mis fixed and the matricesTl(g) form a 21+ 1 dimensional irreducible representation of.Spherically symmetric operations, such as covariant differentiation of tensors and the contraction of tensors with other spherically symmetric tensor fields, are shown to act in a particularly simple way on the terms of the series mentioned above: terms with givenl, nare transformed into others with the same values ofl, n. That this must be so follows from Schur's Lemma and the fact that for eachmandlthe functionsform a basis for an invariant subspace of functions onof dimension 2l+ 1 in which an irreducible representation ofacts. Explicit formulae for the results of such operations are presented.The results are used to show the existence of scalar potentials for tensors of all ranks and the results for tensors of the second rank are shown to be closely related to those recently obtained by Backus(1).This work is intended for application in geophysics and other fields where spherical symmetry plays an important role. Since workers in these fields may not be familiar with quantum theory, some matter in sections 2–5 has been included in spite of the fact that it is well known in the quantum theory of angular momentum.