Special Function Potentials for the Laplacian

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the operator Δ + q. Here Δ is the Laplace–Beltrami operator on a compact Lie group G and q is a matrix coefficient of a representation of G. We are able to calculate the powers of Δ + q acting on the function qku. This is done in Section 2 and the reader is refered there for definitions of the special functions q and u.The interest in the operator Δ + q comes originally from physics and in particular from the Schrödinger equation. This is described in [4]. Here we are restricting ourselves to mathematical questions and shall not consider any applications to physics.In this paper we take the heat equation with potential as(1.1)with , the upper half plane, and initial data f(x, 0) = qk(x)u(x).