Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 321 1 a ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Interpret the outer Dirac delta function as a boundary source carrying its full mass, or as the limit of a narrow source lying just inside . Then for , andThus the interior is the usual steady Keplerian accretion disk with a constant inward accretion rate. The product vanishes at the stress-free inner edge, and the surface density of a disk does too if the viscosity has a finite nonzero boundary value; far from that edge approaches . Its density need not itself be constant because the viscosity may vary.
The outer-edge source of a viscous disk requires care about the boundary trace. The flux just inside the injecting edge is , while the no-flux value outside the source is ; the source produces the intervening jump. A simultaneously continuous interior condition would contradict nonzero steady injection. A symmetrically regularized delta integrated only up to its center can instead give half its full weight; that would mean a different supplied mass, not a different interior solution for the same . The physically normalized one-sided limiting source removes this convention ambiguity.