Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-differential-equations-2-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/1/a/solution

On an interval with , use the power-law ansatz . Substitution gives , whose roots are . Taking real and imaginary parts of gives
These two real solutions are linearly independent: their Wronskian is . They therefore span the solution space of the second-order linear ordinary differential equation on that interval.
For , replace by and by , with independent real constants on the negative interval. This follows equally by the change of variable , which turns the Cauchy-Euler equation into . The coefficient of vanishes at zero, so the general formula is stated separately on either side. Every nonzero mode has an unbounded oscillatory envelope as ; a continuous extension through zero requires the solution to vanish identically on both sides.

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