Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2024 / Paper 1 / 10 / b / Solution

The Sturm-Liouville eigenfunction expansion of a suitable real function $f$ isComparing this identity with the sampling property of the Dirac delta distribution gives the completeness kernelThis is an identity of distributions, rather than a pointwise-convergent series of ordinary functions.

Assuming zero is not an eigenvalue, define the spectral Green function of a regular Sturm-Liouville problem byApplying ${\mathcal{L}}_x$ gives $w(x){\sum }_n{y}_n(x)y_n(\xi )=\delta (x-\xi )$: multiplying the preceding completeness kernel by $w(x)/w(\xi )$ leaves the Dirac delta distribution unchanged. Each term also obeys the same homogeneous boundary conditions. There is no extra weight factor in $G$ for the ordinary source measure $d\xi$.

If zero is an eigenvalue, the inverse Green's function does not exist on all forcing functions: the forcing must obey the solvability condition at a Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue. Omitting the zero mode instead constructs a reduced inverse, with its projection removed from the right-hand side. This exception occurs in part (c) at $\alpha =1$.