Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2003 iii Paper 78 2 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Away from the line source, insert a leading wavefront form into the shear-horizontal wave equation and match the two most singular orders. The first gives the eikonal equation . The next givesEquivalently, SH ray-tube amplitude transport conserves , where is the transverse width of a two-dimensional ray tube. A line source has straight radial elastic rays and for fixed angular width, soThe same geometrical spreading applies to the first nonzero derivative discontinuity or leading wavefront singularity; the source history determines which waveform and normalization occur. In three dimensions a point source instead has and amplitude proportional to .
This does not contradict the SH line-source near-field singularity. Ray transport describes an arrival-front limit with small, or the high-frequency field outside the immediate source neighborhood. The logarithm describes at fixed elapsed time and includes the tail behind the two-dimensional wavefront. For example, a causal step force has the exact radial displacementFor , this is , the near-source logarithm. For with , it isThe coefficient of the leading arrival singularity therefore has exactly the ray-theory dependence. A force impulse gives the corresponding leading field. The limits describe different regions of one causal solution; neither is a uniform approximation to the other.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2003 iii Paper 78 2 i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Let be displacement along the source line and let be its force per unit length. The shear-horizontal wave equation isRotational symmetry about the line makes . Integrate over a disk of radius and use the divergence theorem:At a fixed regular time, a logarithmic singularity and its time derivatives are locally integrable; the inertial integral is and vanishes as . The leading balance is consequently , giving the SH line-source near-field singularityThe reference length only changes the bounded term; boundary conditions and source history determine that term. This is a local fixed-time statement, interpreted distributionally in time if the source force has jumps. It establishes logarithmic spatial dependence directly, without extrapolating far-field ray spreading into the source.