Let us consider the following problem
with
.
Assume . Note that the Schwartz space
consists of all indefinitely differentiable functions
such that
for every multi-index and
. We shall prove that the total energy at time
is constant in time.
Our approach is based on the Fourier transform. Note that the Fourier transform of a Schwartz function is defined by
.
It is worth noticing that the Fourier transform maps to itself. Taking the Fourier transform with respect to space variable
we have
and
.
Solving the above initial problem of the ordinary differential equation, we get
and therefore
.
As a consequence,
.
We are now in a position to apply Plancherel’s Theorem to get the desired result.
Theorem (Plancherel). Suppose
. Then
.
Moreover
.
Let us denote by this common value of the total energy. One can show that
.
The key point is to use the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma from harmonic analysis. We refer the reader to a book entitled Fourier Analysis due to Stein and Shakarchi.