Pizzetti formulae and the Radon Transform on the Sphere

Abstract

In this paper, we obtain Pizzetti-type formulae on regions of the the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{m-1}$ of $\mathbb{R}^m$, and study their applications to the problem of inverting the spherical Radon transform. In particular, we approach integration over $(m-2)$-dimensional sub-spheres of $\mathbb{S}^{m-1}$, $(m-1)$-dimensional sub-balls, and over $(m-1)$-dimensional spherical caps as the action of suitable concentrated delta distributions. In turn, this leads to Pizzetti formulae that express such integrals in terms of the action of SO$(m-1)$-invariant differential operators. In the last section of the paper, we use some of these expressions to derive the inversion formulae for the Radon transform on $\mathbb{S}^{m-1}$ in a direct way.