Laplace expansion (potential)
In physics, the Laplace expansion of potentials that are directly proportional to the inverse of the distance, such as Newton's gravitational potential or Coulomb's electrostatic potential, expresses them in terms of the spherical Legendre polynomials. In quantum mechanical calculations on atoms the expansion is used in the evaluation of integrals of the inter-electronic repulsion.
The Laplace expansion is in fact the expansion of the inverse distance between two points. Let the points have position vectors and, then the Laplace expansion is
Here has the spherical polar coordinates and has with homogeneous polynomials of degree. Further r< is min and r> is max. The function is a normalized spherical harmonic function. The expansion takes a simpler form when written in terms of solid harmonics,Derivation
The derivation of this expansion is simple. By the law of cosines,
We find here the generating function of the Legendre polynomials :
Use of the spherical harmonic addition theorem
gives the desired result.
