A. Stern's analysis of the nodal sets of some families of spherical harmonics revisited
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: A. Stern's analysis of the nodal sets of some families of spherical harmonics revisited
zbMATH Open document ID: 1351.33014
author: Bernard Helffer
author: Pierre Bérard
published in: Monatshefte für Mathematik
publication date: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.5564
review text: The analysis of \textit{A. Stern} [Bemerkungen über asymptotisches Verhalten von Eigenwerten und Eigenfunktionen. Math. Naturwiss. Diss. Göttingen (1925; JFM 51.0356.01)] and \textit{H. Lewy} [Commun. Partial Differ. Equations 2, 1233--1244 (1977; Zbl 0377.31008)] devoted to construction of spherical harmonics with two or three nodal domains is revisited. In Section 2 some properties of spherical harmonics and Legendre functions are recalled. In Section 3 a proof of the following Stern's theorem is given: Let \(\mathbb S^2\) be the unit sphere in \(\mathbb R^3\) and \(\Delta\) the non-positive spherical Laplacian then for any odd integer \(l\) there exists a spherical harmonic of degree \(l\) whose nodal set consists of a single simple closed curve (as a consequence, \(u\) has exactly two nodal domains). In Section 4 Stern's theorem concerning the case of even \(l\) is proved: Let \(\mathbb S^2\) be the unit sphere in \(\mathbb R^3\) then for any even integer \(l\geq2\) there exists a spherical harmonic of degree \(l\) whose nodal set consists of two disjoint simple closed curves (as a consequence, \(u\) has exactly three nodal domains). In Section 5 the Courant sharp property and open questions for minimal partitions for the sphere are discussed. In Appendix (Section 6) some numerical computations of nodal sets of spherical harmonics are given.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 33C55
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 35B05
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 58J50
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 35P20
zbMATH DE Number: 6608233
zbMATH Keywords: spherical harmonic
zbMATH Keywords: nodal lines
zbMATH Keywords: nodal domains
zbMATH Keywords: Courant theorem
reviewed by: Valery V. Karachik
MaRDI profile type: MaRDI publication profile
OpenAlex ID: W3104710463
arXiv ID: 1407.5564
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DOI: 10.1007/S00605-015-0788-6
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description: scientific article