Browsing by Subject "Uncertainty principle"

This thesis surveys the vast landscape of uncertainty principles of the Fourier transform. The research of these uncertainty principles began in the mid 1920’s following a seminal lecture by Wiener, where he first gave the remark that condenses the idea of uncertainty principles: "A function and its Fourier transform cannot be simultaneously arbitrarily small". In this thesis we examine some of the most remarkable classical results where different interpretations of smallness is applied. Also more modern results and links to active fields of research are presented.We make great effort to give an extensive list of references to build a good broad understanding of the subject matter.Chapter 2 gives the reader a sufficient basic theory to understand the contents of this thesis. First we talk about Hilbert spaces and the Fourier transform. Since they are very central concepts in this thesis, we try to make sure that the reader can get a proper understanding of these subjects from our description of them. Next, we study Sobolev spaces and especially the regularity properties of Sobolev functions. After briefly looking at tempered distributions we conclude the chapter by presenting the most famous of all uncertainty principles, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.In chapter 3 we examine how the rate of decay of a function affects the rate of decay of its Fourier transform. This is the most historically significant form of the uncertainty principle and therefore many classical results are presented, most importantly the ones by Hardy and Beurling. In 2012 Hedenmalm gave a beautiful new proof to the result of Beurling. We present the proof after which we briefly talk about the Gaussian function and how it acts as the extremal case of many of the mentioned results.In chapter 4 we study how the support of a function affects the support and regularity of its Fourier transform. The magnificent result by Benedicks and the results following it work as the focal point of this chapter but we also briefly talk about the Gap problem, a classical problem with recent developments.Chapter 5 links density based uncertainty principle to Fourier quasicrystals, a very active field of re-search. We follow the unpublished work of Kulikov-Nazarov-Sodin where first an uncertainty principle is given, after which a formula for generating Fourier quasicrystals, where a density condition from the uncertainty principle is used, is proved. We end by comparing this formula to other recent formulas generating quasicrystals.