On a General Method for Resolving Integrals of Multiple Spherical Bessel Functions Against Power Laws into Distributions

Abstract

We here present a method of performing integrals of products of spherical Bessel functions (SBFs) weighted by a power-law. Our method, which begins with double-SBF integrals, exploits a differential operator D defined via Bessel's differential equation. Application of this operator raises the power-law in steps of two. We also here display a suitable base integral expression to which this operator can be applied for both even and odd cases. We test our method by showing that it reproduces previously-known solutions. Importantly, it also goes beyond them, offering solutions in terms of singular distributions, Heaviside functions, and Gauss's hypergeometric, 2F1 for all double-SBF integrals with positive semi-definite integer power-law weight. We then show how our method for double-SBF integrals enables evaluating arbitrary triple-SBF overlap integrals, going beyond the cases currently in the literature. This in turn enables reduction of arbitrary quadruple, quintuple, and sextuple-SBF integrals and beyond into tractable forms.