Analytic Continuation of Divergent Integrals

Abstract

In this work the improper integral of monomial µ(s) = ∞ 1 x −s dx is considered as continuous analogy of infinite series in the context of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) = ∞ n=1 n −s . Both the integral and the sum of monomial functions diverge to infinity for s ∈ C with Re(s) ≤ 1, while they become convergent otherwise. This paper presents analytic continuation of divergent integral of monomial over the entire complex plane with the exception of the pole at one, similar to analytic continuation of the zeta-function. It is shown that the improper integral can be equivalently written in term of Dirichlet series by making term-by-term integration of the monomial over successive integer intervals and using the Newton's generalization of the binomial theorem. This allows us to establish an elegant relationship between the µ-function and ζ-function and a functional equation that are exploited to assign meaningful solution to the divergent integral in the sense of analytic continuation. Subsequently, it is proved that the µ-function is holomorphic everywhere except for a simple pole at s = 1 and that the analytic continuation solution is consistent with the Abel-Plana formula.