The Newtonian force experienced by a point mass near a finite cylindrical source

The Newtonian gravitational force experienced by a point mass located at some external point from a thick-walled, hollow and uniform finite circular cylindrical body was recently solved by Lockerbie, Veryaskin and Xu (1993 Class. Quantum Grav. 10 2419). Their method of attack relied on the introduction of the circular cylindrical free-space Green function representation for the inverse distance which appears in the formulation of the Newtonian potential function. This ultimately leads Lockerbie et al to a final expression for the Newtonian potential function which is expressed as a double summation of even-ordered Legendre polynomials. However, the kernel of the cylindrical free-space Green function which is represented by an infinite integral of the product of two Bessel functions and a decaying exponential can be analytically evaluated in terms of a toroidal function. This leads to a simplification in the mathematical analysis developed by Lockerbie et al. Also, each term in the infinite series solution for the Newtonian potential function can be expressed in closed form in terms of elementary functions. The authors develop the Newtonian potential function by employing toroidal functions of zeroth order or Legendre functions of half-integral degree, Qm-1/2(β)(Bouwkamp and de Bruijn 1947 J. Appl. Phys.18 562, Cohl et al 2001 Phys. Rev.A 64 052509-1, Selvaggi et al 2004 IEEE Trans. Magn.40 3278). These functions are monotonically decreasing and converge rapidly (Moon and Spencer 1961 Field Theory for Engineers (New Jersey: Van Nostrand Company) pp 368-76, Cohl and Tohline 1999 Astrophys. J.527 86). The introduction of the toroidal harmonic expansion leads to an infinite series solution for which each term can be expressed as an elementary function. This enables one to easily compute the axial and radial forces experienced by an internal or an external point mass