The PDF specifies decay as ; the local TeX drops this limit from its displayed boundary data. Take , so the conformal map is . Its components are
For and , . The bottom edge maps monotonically to , and the two vertical sides map to the real rays and . The derivative never vanishes in the interior. Injectivity follows from the identities for equal sines: the alternatives and give only the identical point within this strip. Surjectivity can be seen directly: for fixed and , solve ; then
On , with the lower endpoint read as when , the right side increases strictly from zero to infinity. Thus every point of the upper half-plane has a unique preimage.
By conformal invariance of harmonicity, write the transformed harmonic function as . Its real-axis boundary data are
The inverse sine on is its real principal branch. For bounded integrable data, take the Fourier transform convention . The Laplace equation becomes , with the bounded decaying solution . Inverting the Fourier transform gives
Consequently the Poisson kernel for the upper half-plane yields
The decay is uniform across the strip: and, for , . This verifies the printed decay condition. Boundary limits give the prescribed values at continuity points away from the corners.
For the given sine data,
Values assigned at do not alter the integral. There is no solution continuous on the entire closed half-strip for these data: the bottom edge has corner limits , but the side edges have corner limits zero. The formula is the bounded Dirichlet problem solution with the specified limits away from those two corners. This is the usual interpretation of the printed problem; boundedness excludes additional boundary-singular harmonic functions, while decay alone without a regularity or boundedness condition does not establish uniqueness.
For the upper half-plane use , and interpret the source's arctangent as this argument. Then is harmonic, so has zero curl and divergence where there is no charge. On the positive boundary and ; on the negative boundary . Hence the two boundary values are respectively zero and .
Branch qualification: the principal real arctangent alone gives zero on both sides of , contradicting the stated negative-axis boundary condition, for example at . The continuous upper-half-plane argument repairs this notation; it is not an optional additive constant.
Along a level curve, , with and . Therefore
In the intended upper half-plane , the slope is positive for , vertical at , and negative for . At the positive real boundary the slope is zero except at the stationary point , where both derivatives vanish and the quotient is indeterminate. More generally, outside the chosen half-plane its sign is the sign of , with the argument branch held fixed. A convenient parametric description of the curves to sketch is .
Figure 1.
Equipotentials for the upper-half-plane logarithm branch and illustrative square-well transmission
. Details.
Split the sine into exponentials. The term closes in the upper half-plane and picks up the pole , giving ; the term closes clockwise below and encloses no pole. Jordan's lemma applies to these separate contours. Hence
To pass to without an invalid dominated-convergence argument on an infinite interval, pair positive and negative first: the imaginary part is odd and the real part is . On a bounded interval the limit is harmless, while integration by parts bounds the oscillatory tail uniformly for . This gives the convergent improper Dirichlet integral .