Examples of Heun and Mathieu functions as solutions of wave equations in curved spaces

Abstract

We give examples where the Heun function exists in general relativity. It turns out that while a wave equation written in the background of certain metric yields Mathieu functions as its solutions in four space-time dimensions, the trivial generalization to five dimensions results in the double confluent Heun function. We reduce this solution to the Mathieu function with some transformations.