Sommerfeld radiation condition
Arnold Sommerfeld defined the condition of radiation for a scalar field satisfying the Helmholtz equation as
Mathematically, consider the inhomogeneous Helmholtz equation
where is the dimension of the space,
is a given function with compact support representing a bounded source of energy, and
is a constant, called the wavenumber. A solution
to this equation is called radiating if it satisfies the Sommerfeld radiation condition