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What is the physical significance of "Green's Functions"?

Greens Functions are used in mathematics to solve non-homogeneous differential
equations. What is there physical significance?
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Applied Mathematics

May 12, 2014

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Popular Answers

[S. I. Hariharan]
S. I. Hariharan � University of Akron
Think of a drum and a drum stick. When you strike the drum it propagates waves
and produces sound (acoustic waves). Now think of the same drum, but you are using
several objects rather than a single stick to hammer the drum. The sound will be
very different. However, you can use the idea of the stick to represent the other
objects.
The idea is that you can learn from what that stick produced to analyze the
larger impulses from other objects. This is exactly what the Green's function
represents - the stick. Overall sound produced by any other objects can be
represented via linear (or integral) combinations of the stick situation. There is
a similar idea in signal processing. They don't call it Green's function - but it
is referred to as impulse response function. Same idea. The Green's function works
for continuous systems. The impulse response function works for discrete systems.
May 13, 2014

All Answers (6)

[Arno Gorgels]
Arno Gorgels � Principia Naturae
Https://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/336_11/papers/jeff.pdf ?
May 12, 2014
[Alexander Konyukhov]
Alexander Konyukhov � Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Thinking about only one-sentence-answer:

The Green function, of fundamental solution

(for the particular linear problem descrbed by PartialDiffEqns)
is the SOLUTION of this PDE,
but ONLY for the load applied at one point
(the point is understood in general way - can be a point in time or in space)

Using the Green function one can try further to construct the full solution of
the problem
(e.g. for the full distributed load, satisfying all boundary conditions etc etc
- this is somewhat mathematical adventure to do this for each particular problem)
 May 13, 2014
[Trilochan Sahoo]
Trilochan Sahoo � IIT Kharagpur
In general, Green's function technique is used to deal with non homogeneous
boundary value problem. In the derivation of the Green's function, the non-
homogeneous part is dirac delta function which is physically means an impulsive
force, Thus, Green;s function deals with the physical situation in the presence of
an impulsive load.
May 13, 2014
[S. I. Hariharan]
S. I. Hariharan � University of Akron
Think of a drum and a drum stick. When you strike the drum it propagates waves
and produces sound (acoustic waves). Now think of the same drum, but you are using
several objects rather than a single stick to hammer the drum. The sound will be
very different. However, you can use the idea of the stick to represent the other
objects.
The idea is that you can learn from what that stick produced to analyze the
larger impulses from other objects. This is exactly what the Green's function
represents - the stick. Overall sound produced by any other objects can be
represented via linear (or integral) combinations of the stick situation. There is
a similar idea in signal processing. They don't call it Green's function - but it
is referred to as impulse response function. Same idea. The Green's function works
for continuous systems. The impulse response function works for discrete systems.
May 13, 2014
[Silvestro Fassari]
Silvestro Fassari � Universit� Telematica Guglielmo Marconi
In Quantum Physics the Schr�dinger Hamiltonian H can be regarded as an
unbounded self-adjoint square matrix (often semi bounded from below). The Green's
function (also called resolvent in the more mathematically oriented literature) is
simply [H-E]^(-1), the inverse matrix of H-E, where E is any energy not belonging
to the spectrum of H. The Green's function is extremely useful when one deals with
"reasonable" perturbations of the so-called "free" Hamiltonian H0 since it is often
possible to write the Green's function of the perturbed Hamiltonian in terms of the
unperturbed one plus a compact operator.
May 16, 2014