Harmonic quadrant solution from tangential boundary derivatives Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-07
For a harmonic function in the quadrant with boundary derivatives and , integrating the data to equal corner values and applying the Schwarz integral formula after the conformal map gives
These are tangential boundary derivatives, so uniqueness requires an additional normalization or growth restriction. A homogeneous contribution has the form with holomorphic in the complex upper half-plane and real on its boundary away from zero. For example, has zero prescribed derivatives on both edges.
Choose a smooth cutoff function supported in , equal to one on , with and . For , put . The zero Dirichlet boundary condition implies that the tangential boundary derivative vanishes on the flat face. Differentiating the Poisson equation gives . Test this equation with . The boundary terms vanish because on the flat face and near the curved face. Integration by parts in the tangential direction moves off , yielding
This is the essential Caccioppoli inequality step: it involves , rather than . Expanding and using the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and the Young inequality gives
The term is bounded by . Absorbing the first term and summing over proves the hinted estimate:
All mixed second partial derivatives are now controlled, since . The remaining normal derivative is recovered from the equation:
The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality bounds its squared L2 norm by times the sum of the squared L2 norms on the right. Including the already controlled zeroth and first partial derivatives, and taking square roots, gives the second-derivative estimate at a flat Dirichlet boundary:
The full second-order Sobolev norm is controlled without any norm of .
The Wirtinger derivative is holomorphic, since by the Laplace equation. The conformal map takes the quadrant to the complex upper half-plane. Integrating the prescribed tangential boundary derivatives, choose a common corner value and define the real boundary function
The decaying data are bounded under the usual regularity at the corner, so . Thus its Poisson integral converges. A holomorphic function whose real part is that Poisson integral is supplied by the regularized Schwarz integral formula:
For , the chain rule gives . Apply integration by parts to obtain
Substituting and gives the requested particular integral representation:
Both integrals converge absolutely for an interior point of the quadrant. The Sokhotski–Plemelj formula gives on the horizontal edge and on the vertical edge, verifying the prescribed derivatives.
The printed conditions alone do not determine uniquely. The general answer adds a holomorphic function satisfying
Equivalently, write , where is holomorphic in the complex upper half-plane with real boundary values on the nonzero real axis. An antiderivative of has a harmonic real part with zero tangential boundary derivatives. For example, contributes without changing either datum. If the two edge constants differ by , the angular harmonic function contributes . The boxed expression selects the Poisson integral representative with equal edge constants; regularity and suitable growth conditions can be used to select that representative.