1. Introduction
The homogeneous Whittaker equation, first formulated in 1903, represents a classical second-order linear differential equation and is expressed in the form: [
1]:
wherein
and
are parameters and
z and
are variables that could be real or complex. Whittaker [
1] introduced the functions
and
as linearly independent solutions to the homogeneous Whittaker’s equation. The pairs of functions
,
and
discussed below are linearly independent solutions of equation
1. The Wronskian of the Whittaker functions is provided in detail in [
2]:
Equation
1 represents the reduced form of a degenerate hypergeometric equation and possesses a regular singular point at
and an irregular singular point at
.
Whittaker’s equation
1 arises in various areas of physics, particularly in quantum mechanics, and plays a significant role in solving the radial Schrödinger equation in spherical coordinates, and in the solution to the wave equation in parabolic coordinates [
3], in addition to describing the behaviour of charged particles in a Coulomb potential [
4]. Akbarzadeh [
5] utilized the Whittaker differential equation in deriving an exact, analytical solution for convective heat transfer of thermally fully developed laminar nanofluid flow in a circular tube, where the pipe wall is exposed to a constant temperature. Gupta and Bhengra [
6] applied Whittaker functions to the derivation of the dispersion equation governing the propagation of torsional surface waves in an anisotropic layer sandwiched between two anisotropic inhomogeneous media. Conway [
7] employed the Wronskian of the Whittaker functions to calculate indefinite integrals involving Whittaker’s functions and their products.
In the analysis of processes governed by time fractional diffusion and diffusion-wave equations, the Whittaker functions are important both as special functions and for their broad applications in mathematical physics, as they play a central role in the theory of uniform asymptotic expansions of differential equations with coalescing turning points and simple poles, as discussed in [
2,
8,
9]. Mainardi et al. [
10] compared Wright functions of the second kind with Whittaker functions in specific cases of fractional order. Their work in [
10] underscores the importance of Whittaker functions in the context of higher transcendental functions. Szmytkowski [
11] investigated the orthogonality of Whittaker functions of the second kind,
, where
, with the weight function
. Chang et al. [
12] investigated the asymptotic behaviour of the Whittaker function of the second kind for large values of the parameters and the independent variable
z. Dunster [
13] derived uniform asymptotic expansions for the Whittaker functions
and
, as well as the numerically satisfactory companion function
. The expansions are uniformly valid for
and for a specific ratio of the parameters
and
, with
. Using appropriate connection and analytic continuation, the expansions are extended to all unbounded non-zero complex values of
z.
Izarra et al. [
14] applied Pade Approximants in combination with Wynn’s algorithm on a specific asymptotic expansion to achieve precise numerical computations of the Whittaker functions
for various values of the argument
z and the parameters
and
. Ragab [
15] systematically evaluated integrals involving products of Whittaker and Bessel functions.
A general solution to equation
1 can be expressed as a linear combination of these two solutions as:
where
and
are parameters.
The Whittaker functions can be expressed as [
2]:
Where
denotes Kummer’s confluent hypergeometric function of the first kind, and
denotes the confluent hypergeometric function of the second kind (also known as Tricomi’s function).
The function
is undefined when
. Therefore from here on forth, its understood that
, unless otherwise specified. For specific values of these parameters, the Whittaker functions
and
can be simplified to various elementary and special functions, including modified Bessel functions, incomplete gamma functions, parabolic cylinder functions, error functions, logarithmic and cosine integrals, as well as generalized Hermite and Laguerre polynomials. For more details, see [
16] and the references therein. In view of potential applications to engineering problems, we restrict our analysis of the inhomogeneous Whittaker equation to the case where the independent variable
z is real, and hence
The Whittaker function
can be expressed in terms of the Whittaker functions of the first kind
, provided that
, as follows [
8,
9]:
It is important to note that both
and
constitute two linearly independent solutions of the homogeneous Whittaker equation.
In this work, we present a method for obtaining the general solution to Whittaker’s inhomogeneous equation. The approach is based on the introduction of an integral function, denoted by
, whose evaluation relies on a generalization of the Whittaker integrals previously discussed by Appleblatt and Santandar[
16]. To achieve this objective, the manuscript is organized as follows.
Section 2 introduces the inhomogeneous Whittaker equation and presents the function
as part of its solution. The section also outlines the properties of
and explains how it can be evaluated. In
Section 3, we evaluate the function
for specific parameter values and various forms of the function
.
Section 4 presents the derivative of
, derived using the known derivatives of the Whittaker functions. In
Section 5, we provide solutions to the inhomogeneous Whittaker differential equation for both initial and boundary value problems. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the key results and suggests possible directions for future research.
2. Inhomogeneous Whittaker Equation
In this section, we will investigate the inhomogeneous Whittaker equation, which is given by:
A particular solution to the differential equation can be found using the method of variation of parameters. To this end, we introduce the following function:
The Wronskian of the Whittaker functions is given in equation
2 as
Therefore a particular solution of the inhomogeneous Whittaker equation
7 is :
Using equation
3 and
10 general solution of the inhomogeneous Whittaker equation
7 is given by :
The properties of the function are influenced by the properties of the Whittaker functions for different values of the parameters and , as well as by the characteristics of the function . Before presenting a solution to the inhomogeneous Whittaker equation, we will first investigate the function for various parameter values and different forms of .
In their analysis of integrals involving Whittaker functions, Apelblat et al.[
16] define the integral functions
and
that can offer examples of the function
for various parameter values, especially when
. These Whittaker integral functions are define as follows [
16]:
and
For simplicity, we will generalize the notation from [
16] as follows:
Hence, in the newly introduced generalized notation, the functions
and
are represented as
Therefore, we can rewrite the function
given by equation
8 as follows:
It is straight forward that the
. Apelblat et al. [
16] used the Mathematica program to express the Whittaker integral functions in terms of elementary special functions and obtained specific cases of the Whittaker integral functions for different values of the parameters
and
. We used these expressions to derive the following table for the function
:
Table 1.
Example of
Table 1.
Example of
|
|
|
|
0 |
|
| 2 |
|
|
Apelblat et al.[
16] used the following recurrence relations between the Whittaker functions [
8,
9]:
By rearranging this expression, Equation
18 can thus be reformulated as
Consequently, we express integrals involving Whittaker functions in terms of the Whittaker functions
and
in the following relation
Equation
20 can be used to derive an expression for the function
as follow:
6. Conclusions
The primary objective of this work has been to develop a method for solving the inhomogeneous Whittaker differential equation. To achieve this, we introduced a novel class of special integral functions, denoted by , which facilitate the construction of particular solutions to the inhomogeneous form of the Whittaker equation. A detailed analytical study of the function was carried out, including the investigation of its fundamental properties and the derivation of expressions for its derivatives. Computational formulas were established for certain representative cases, especially when the forcing function and the associated parameters and take specific, analytically tractable forms.
To complement the theoretical analysis, we provided graphical representations of the function , which reveal its behaviour under various parameter regimes. These visualizations not only illustrate the properties of the function but also highlight the structure of the corresponding solutions to initial and boundary value problems associated with the Whittaker inhomogeneous differential equation.
The results presented in this work contribute to the broader understanding of special function theory in the context of linear differential equations with inhomogeneous terms. The approach developed here opens up further avenues for the study of related differential systems and may serve as a foundation for applications in mathematical physics and engineering where such equations naturally arise.