New relationships between spherical and spheroidal harmonics and applications

This thesis deals with solutions to Laplace's equation in 3D, finding new relationships between solutions, manipulating these to find new approaches to physical problems, and proposing a new class of solutions. We mainly consider spherical and prolate spheroidal geometry and their corresponding solutions - spherical and spheroidal solid harmonics. We first present new relationships between these, expressing for example spherical harmonics as a series of spheroidal harmonics. Similar relationships are known but we work with the spherical and spheroidal coordinate systems being offset from each other. We also propose a new class of solutions which we call logopoles which have many links with spherical and spheroidal harmonics, and are related to the potential created by simple finite line charge distributions. Through the logopoles we find another relationship between the spheroidal harmonics and the often discarded alternate spherical harmonics. Then we apply one of the new spherical-spheroidal harmonic relationships to problems involving a point charge/dipole outside a dielectric sphere. We find new solutions where the potential is expanded as a series of spheroidal harmonics instead of the standard spherical ones, and we show that the convergence is much faster. We also solve these problems with logopoles and the solutions converge even faster, although they are more complicated as they involve a combination of logopoles and spherical harmonics.