Orthogonality of Associated Legendre Functions for Noninteger Order and Index
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This Demonstration shows an unusual orthogonality relation for Legendre functions of the first kind . In contrast to the well-known situation of integer degree
and integer order
(associated Legendre polynomials), in this case both degree and order are allowed to take noninteger real values. For fixed
, these functions satisfy an orthogonality relation, according to which
is 0 whenever
is equal to 2 if
and
, and is given by the formula
in any other case.
Contributed by: Axel Schulze-Halberg and John R. Morris (May 2013)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA