Arbitrary powers of D’Alembertians and the Huygens’ principle

By means of some reasonable rules the operators that can represent arbitrary powers of the D’Alembertian and their corresponding Green’s functions are defined. It is found which powers lead to the validity of Huygens’ principle. The specially interesting case of powers that are half an odd integer in spaces of odd dimensionality, obey Huygens’ principle, and can be expressed as iterated D’Alembertians of the retarded potential are discussed. Arbitrary powers of the Laplacian operator as well as their corresponding Green’s functions are also discussed.