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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 ).
In vector calculus, divergence is a vector operator that operates on a vector field, producing a scalar field giving the quantity of the vector field's source at each point. More technically, the divergence represents the volume density of the outward flux of a vector field from an infinitesimal volume around a given point.
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 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.
Similarly, any polar coordinate is identical to the coordinate with the negative radial component and the opposite direction (adding 180° to the polar angle). Therefore, the same point ( r , φ ) can be expressed with an infinite number of different polar coordinates ( r , φ + n × 360°) and (− r , φ + 180° + n × 360°) = (− r , φ ...
The divergence of a second-order tensor field in cylindrical polar coordinates can be obtained from the expression for the gradient by collecting terms where the scalar product of the two outer vectors in the dyadic products is nonzero.
Let (x, y, z) be the standard Cartesian coordinates, and (ρ, θ, φ) the spherical coordinates, with θ the angle measured away from the +Z axis (as , see conventions in spherical coordinates). As φ has a range of 360° the same considerations as in polar (2 dimensional) coordinates apply whenever an arctangent of it is taken. θ has a range ...