The vertical slice transform on the unit sphere

Abstract

The vertical slice transform in spherical integral geometry takes a function on the unit sphere Sⁿ to integrals of that function over spherical slices parallel to the last coordinate axis. This transform was investigated for n = 2 in connection with inverse problems of spherical tomography. The present article gives a survey of some methods which were originally developed for the Radon transform, hypersingular integrals, and the spherical mean Radon-like transforms, and can be adapted to obtain new inversion formulas and singular value decompositions for the vertical slice transform in the general case n ≥ 2 for a large class of functions.