Hi all,
I am posing a question that has plagued me since I studied these in a Dynamical Systems course a couple of years ago...
Is it possible to get an integral representation for the (angular) Mathieu Functions (AMF's) - via generating functions or any method?
Consulting Ambrowitz and Stegun, and searching through recent papers the closest I came to finding such a result was one that (paradoxically) gave the integral representation of the AMF's in terms of itself (it appeared in the integral kernel).
So I was wondering if anyone could do any better or clarify this.
John
Some ideas
I gather you mean the MathieuC function? [Or the MathieuCE?]. I will assume MathieuC.
There certainly does not seem to be anything obvious in the "standard" references, nor a quick Google away. However, the (algebraic) version of the Mathieu function is a special case of the HeunC function. And there are interesting integral representations for those, for example in this paper (see p.9 for example). Yes, those representations are in terms of HeunC itself -- however observe the ``free parameter'' c introduced in equation (6.6). The idea then would be to pick a parameter value for this c that causes the HeunC function to "collapse" to something simpler, thus giving you an honest-to-goodness integral transform.
The other trick is to try to find good kernel functions. Lemma 3.3 from that paper allows quite a bit of flexibility in that regard.
Unfortunately, the obvious representations do not help: both Laplace transforms and Fourier transforms end up giving an ODE whose solution is again in terms of Mathieu functions.