Formally, it is an operator
such that
where
denotes surface measure on the unit sphere
,
, and
for some
.[1] Here, the notation
denotes the fourier transform of
. In this Lebesgue integral,
is a point on the unit sphere and
is the Lebesgue measure on the sphere, or in other words the Lebesgue analog of
.
The Fourier extension operator is the (formal) adjoint of the Fourier restriction operator
, where the
notation represents restriction to the set
.[1]