Spherical Harmonics
Initializing live version
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
Spherical harmonics give the angular part of the solution to Laplace's equation in spherical coordinates. They arise in many practical situations, notably atomic orbitals, particle scattering processes and antenna radiation patterns.
Contributed by: Stephen Wolfram (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
In physical settings, the degree is normally called the orbital quantum number and the order the magnetic quantum number.
Permanent Citation