The resonant Legendre equation (Q1080010): Difference between revisions

One knows that the response of a harmonic oscillator to a periodic external force, having the same frequency, is unbounded. This sort of behaviour, manifested in practical situations as a resonance, is familiar to generations of students as a complication which arises when one tries to find a particular integral to an inhomogeneous linear ordinary differential equation with constant coefficients for which the right-hand side is part of the complementary function. In this paper we study the analogous problem where the differential equation is the inhomogeneous version of the Legendre equation in which the right-hand side is a Legendre function. A complete explicit solution is given when the inhomogeneous term is a Legendre polynomial. In this case the resonance shows up as a logarithmic singularity in the solution. Some progress is made in finding explicit solutions when the inhomogeneous term is a function of the second kind. In the zero order case the solution involves the di-logarithm function, wherein lies the resonance. [Note: the author has now obtained solutions for the resonant form of the Hermite equation.]