Single layer potential

Imagine you have a big bowl of water and you drop a pebble in it. When you drop the pebble, it makes little ripples in the water, spreading out in circles from where the pebble hit the surface. The height and direction of these ripples depend on how hard you dropped the pebble, where you dropped it, and how deep the water is.

Now imagine instead of a bowl of water, we have a big empty space with no water, but we still have a pebble. We can use math to create something called the single layer potential that will tell us how the pebble would affect the air or space around it, just like it affected the water in the bowl.

The single layer potential is like a recipe that tells us how to calculate the height and direction of ripples, or waves, that the pebble would create in the air or space. We can use this recipe to figure out how sound waves, light waves, or other types of waves would be affected by an object in their path.

So, the single layer potential is a mathematical tool that helps us understand how objects affect the air or space around them, just like a pebble affects the water around it.