Power series expansions for spheroidal wave functions with small arguments (Q5957971)

This paper is concerned with the prolate angular spheroidal functions of the first kind \(S_{mn}(c, \eta)\) solutions of the differential equation \[ \frac d{d\eta}\left [(1-\eta ^2)\frac {dS_{mn}}{d\eta}\right ]+\left [\lambda _{mn}-c^2\eta ^2-\frac {m^2}{1-\eta ^2}\right ]S_{mn}=0, \] resulting when the scalar wave equation is separated in prolate spheroidal coordinates. The authors obtain power series expansions of \(S_{mn}(c, \eta)\) with small arguments \(c\), for general integer values of \(m\) and \(n\). The various calculated expansion coefficients can be used in the evaluation of the angular spheroidal wave functions of the second kind and for the radial functions of any kind. In the paper are considered explicitly only the expansions for prolate spherical functions, but, by replacing some variables in these functions, it is possible to obtain analogous expansions for the oblate spherical functions. Comparisons of the results, for special values of the parameters, with several already existing ones obtained by other methods, are given also.