Recursive construction for a class of radial functions. I. Ordinary space

A class of spherical functions is studied which can be viewed as the matrix generalization of Bessel functions. We derive a recursive structure for these functions. We show that they are only special cases of more general radial functions which also have a properly generalized, recursive structure. Some explicit results are worked out. For the first time, we identify a subclass of such radial functions which consist of a finite number of terms only. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.