Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2014/paper-1/7/iii/solution

For a circle in the right half-plane use . Its centre and radius from part (ii) satisfy . Hence choose
Put . Then and
Indeed the Apollonius circle has centre and radius . Its logarithmic modulus is therefore , while on the modulus is one. The logarithmic Dirichlet potential between a circle and a line is
The logarithmic singularity at lies inside the excluded disk, since . The other singularity, at , lies outside the right half-plane. Thus the real logarithmic modulus is harmonic throughout the required region and has exactly the two specified boundary values.
Local branches of the complex logarithm justify harmonicity; its real part is globally single-valued even though the complex logarithm need not be single-valued around the excluded disk. The displayed solution is bounded and tends to zero at infinity. A boundedness or corresponding far-field condition supplies uniqueness in this unbounded domain; finite boundary values alone do not rule out unbounded additional harmonic solutions. The same geometry appears in cylinder-plane image charges.
Figure 1.
Apollonius circles and a bounded harmonic potential outside a circle beside a line
. Details.

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