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This article uses the standard notation ISO 80000-2, which supersedes ISO 31-11, for spherical coordinates (other sources may reverse the definitions of θ and φ): . The polar angle is denoted by [,]: it is the angle between the z-axis and the radial vector connecting the origin to the point in question.
Once the radius is fixed, the three coordinates (r, θ, φ), known as a 3-tuple, provide a coordinate system on a sphere, typically called the spherical polar coordinates. The plane passing through the origin and perpendicular to the polar axis (where the polar angle is a right angle ) is called the reference plane (sometimes fundamental plane ).
Vectors are defined in cylindrical coordinates by (ρ, φ, z), where ρ is the length of the vector projected onto the xy-plane, φ is the angle between the projection of the vector onto the xy-plane (i.e. ρ) and the positive x-axis (0 ≤ φ < 2π), z is the regular z-coordinate. (ρ, φ, z) is given in Cartesian coordinates by:
In quantum mechanics, the position operator is the operator that corresponds to the position observable of a particle. When the position operator is considered with a wide enough domain (e.g. the space of tempered distributions ), its eigenvalues are the possible position vectors of the particle.
In the cylindrical coordinate system, a z-coordinate with the same meaning as in Cartesian coordinates is added to the r and θ polar coordinates giving a triple (r, θ, z). [8] Spherical coordinates take this a step further by converting the pair of cylindrical coordinates (r, z) to polar coordinates (ρ, φ) giving a triple (ρ, θ, φ). [9]
In spherical coordinates in N dimensions, with the parametrization x = rθ ∈ R N with r representing a positive real radius and θ an element of the unit sphere S N−1, = + + where Δ S N−1 is the Laplace–Beltrami operator on the (N − 1)-sphere, known as the spherical Laplacian.
Position space (also real space or coordinate space) is the set of all position vectors r in Euclidean space, and has dimensions of length; a position vector defines a point in space. (If the position vector of a point particle varies with time, it will trace out a path, the trajectory of a particle.)
Other differential operators such as and can be expressed in the coordinates (,) by substituting the scale factors into the general formulae found in orthogonal coordinates. As is the case with spherical coordinates, Laplace's equation may be solved by the method of separation of variables to yield solutions in the form of prolate spheroidal ...