[Physics] Integration over arbitrary domains

calculusclassical-mechanicscontinuum-mechanicsfield-theorymathematical physics

In mathematical physics, we sometimes encounter situations where we have integrals of the forms:

$$\text{(case 1):}\ \ \ \ \int\limits_{D} f(x,y,z) dx dy dz =k$$
$$\text{(case 2):}\ \ \ \ \int\limits_{D} f(x,y,z) dx dy dz =\int\limits_{D} g(x,y,z) dx dy dz$$
where $D$ is an arbitrary domain (e.g. volume) of intergation over the $(x,y,z)$ variables and $k$ is some constant.

Because of $D$'s arbitrariness (i.e. can be taken small enough so that the integrand is taken outside integral sign), we usually proceed by taking $f,g$ outside the integral and ending up with the corresponding results:
$$\text{(case 1):}\ \ \ \ f=k/V_{D}$$
$$\text{(case 2):}\ \ \ \ f=g$$

where $V_{D}$ is the volume $\int_{D}dxdydz$.

Questions:

(a) Is there any formal/rigorous theorems in math (e.g. in analysis) that specialise in such situations or explain its conditions in general? What branch/subbranch of math would cover such problems?

(b) If we are faced with a problem of case (2) above, for example, and we could find some kind of domains $D$ of a certain shape but arbitrary size (e.g. say $D$ as a sphere of arbitrary radius) for which both sides (integrals) are known to be equal (and hence we reach equality of integrands), will that be enough to conclude that equality of integrals will reduce to equality of integrands in general (or do we need to first show that it is also true for all other arbitrary shapes of $D$)?

(c) Finally, could the same discussion/conclusions of case (2) above be extended to the case of integrals over closed surfaces (via Divergence's theorem for instance?): $\oint\limits_{A} \boldsymbol{F}\cdot \boldsymbol{dA}=\oint\limits_{A} \boldsymbol{G}\cdot \boldsymbol{dA}$?

(Note – I have asked this question on math SE, but got no answers.)

Best Answer

You may be interested in the book "Methods of Applied Mathematics" by Arbogast and Bona, available here as a pdf

https://www.google.co.uk/url?q=https://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/arbogast/appMath08c.pdf&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjL5s2U-MPVAhWjLMAKHenGAAMQFggOMAA&usg=AFQjCNGW21X85j7nqyk6zuDOxRG5wdZ5Pg

Its quite a tough read, but of interest is proposition 1.39 on page 21, which can be restated for continuous functions that, if for all measurable $D \subset \Omega$, where $\Omega$ is the domain of our function (and a union of finite balls, so that we dont have any wierd measure zero bits), we have $$ \int_D f dV = 0 $$ Then $$ f(x) = 0 \forall x \in \Omega $$

This does you for case 1 when the right hand side is zero. I'm not at all sure that the nonzero case is even true...

For case 2 $$ \int_D f dV = \int_D g dV $$ $$ \int_D f - g dV = 0 $$ $$ f-g=0 $$ $$ f=g $$

I hope that answers part a). For part b) the answer is no. If you have a series of concentric spheres for which the volume integrals are equal, then you can then conclude that the surface integrals over the spheres are equal, but the values may be distributed differently over those spherical surfaces.

For part c), if those surfaces are not necessarily closed, then a version the above theorum will apply and you have that $F=G$ (I dont have a proof of this, just intuition). If the surfaces must be closed then the theorum will not apply since we do not have the result for all domains, but we can use the divergence theorum and then the above theorum to obtain that $\nabla \cdot F=\nabla \cdot G$

Edit

Here I correct and expand on my answer to part b).

For a simply connected open set $D$ and a continuous function $f$ we have the multivariate mean value theorem for integrals, which states that there exists some $c \in D$ for which $$ \int_D f(x) dV = f(c) |D| $$ where $|D|$ is the volume (specifically, the measure) of the open set.

Therefore, if we have an infinite sequence of simply connected open sets $D_0,D_1,...$ such that the sets all include some point $x_0$, and the sets 'tend towards' this point, specifically $$ \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} (\max_{x \in D_n} |x-x_0|) = 0 $$ then for each domain we can specify a point $c_n$ for which $$ \frac{1} {|D_n|} \int_{D_n} f(x) dV = f(c_n) =0 $$ where the equality with zero is from the question. We have that $c_n \in D_n$ thus $c_n \rightarrow x_0$ as $n \rightarrow \infty$ and $f(x_0)=0$.

Thus, if you find a set of simply connected open domains of arbitrarily small size around every point, the above shows that $f=0$.

We can therefore state the following theorem:

If, for each point $x_0$ in an open domain $\Omega$, we have that, for a sequence of simply connected open subsets $D_n$, $n$ any natural number, $$ \int_{D_n} f(x) dV =0 $$ for some continuous function $f$, and $$ \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} (\max_{x \in D_n} |x-x_0|) = 0 $$ then $$ f=0 $$

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