Recently, I've been interested in expanding an angular function over the spherical harmonics, and particularly in retrieving the amplitude of the part corresponding to a given degree ℓ. More precisely, let F(Ω)=F(θ,ϕ)=∑ℓ∑mYℓm(Ω). The projection of F onto the subspace spanned by the harmonics with a given degree ℓ (I believe this space is generally denoted by Hℓ) is:
Projℓ[F](Ω)=ℓ∑m=−ℓcℓmYℓm(Ω)
which can be rewritten using cℓm=∫dΩY∗ℓm(Ω)F(Ω) and the addition theorem of spherical harmonics as:
Projℓ[F](Ω)=2ℓ+14π∫dΩ′F(Ω′)Pℓ[cos(^Ω,Ω′)]
and I want to determine the coefficient
cℓ=ℓ∑m=−ℓ|cℓm|2=∫dΩ|Projℓ[F](Ω)|2
At this point I can either compute all the individual cℓm's and sum them up (which is probably the faster option) or develop (3) using (1) and the closure relation to yield:
cℓ=∫dΩ∫dΩ′F∗(Ω)F(Ω′)Pℓ[cos(^Ω,Ω′)]
I'm pretty sure (4) is a standard result (with a more elegant proof than the pedestrian strategy I used) but I couldn't find it anywhere.
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