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Before going through the Carpal-Tunnel causing calisthenics to calculate its form in cylindrical and spherical coordinates, the results appear here so that more intelligent people can just move along without troubling themselves. In cylindrical form:
In spherical coordinates:
; inversely,
.
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The chain rule relates the Cartesian operators to the cylindrical operators:
and
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Think FOIL. Fx+Fy: the sum of the products of the first terms for the two derivatives gives a second derivative with respect to . Ox +Oy: the outside terms cancel. Ix +Iy: the sum of the inside terms gives the derivative with respect to divided by . Lx +Ly: the sum of the products of the last terms for the two derivatives gives a second derivative with respect to divided by squared. Put it all together to get the Laplacian in cylindrical coordinates.
Next find the partial derivatives of , once again by implicit differentiation. To find the derivatives with respect to x and y, use the expression for cos().
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Then use the expression for sin() to find the derivative with respect to z.
The derivatives of are the same as they were for cylindrical coordinates. For posterity, here they are in terms of spherical coordinates.
Now comes the chain rule. This time, it's a bit uglier, since there are three variables involved. The simplest of the three terms in the Cartesian Laplacian to translate is z, since it is independent of the azimuthal angle.
This calls for an orgainized approach. All told, there is a total of 22 terms. First consider those that go like the second derivative of r. Collecting the three terms (one x , one y, one z), to find that they contribute
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. That wasn't so bad. Three down, 19 to go. Clinging to the fringes of the equations, next consider the terms that go like the second derivative of and find the contribution
. The result is not quite as pretty, but it was still mostly painless. Only 17 terms remain! To complete the diagonal derivatives, gather the three terms that come from the product of two derivatives with respect to to find the contribution
. Some easy math has been omitted. That was another three terms, which leaves 14. For the next bout of sadomasochism, collect all terms that result from the product of an r derivative and a derivative. This way, at least all z terms will be finished. The contribution is
If you didn't notice that some serious cancellation of cross terms happened before that pretty equation could be written, then you're not really paying attention. If you did notice, then you probably also noticed that 6 terms from our 22 term torture session just bit the dust. Consider the 4 - cross terms. When the dust settles, the remaining bit is
Only four more terms! Eager to see the end, tally the contributions from r- cross terms. The terms that don't cancel each other give the contribution
. Now we gather all the terms to write the Laplacian operator in spherical coordinates:
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Notice that multiplying the whole operator by r2 completely separates the angular terms from the radial term. That is why all that work was worthwhile. Now it's time to solve some partial differential equations!!! See Legendre Polynomials and Spherical Harmonics.
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