The good life in the frequency domain

Example: the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou

experiment (the FFT is everywhere)
Tradeoff between time and frequency
resolution Heisenberg uncertainty
principle
Windows, apodizing


Three birds with one stone
Heres an example of how to set up an ode
in Matlab, a peek at how the Fermi-Pasta-
Ulam-Tsingou experiment works, and how
handy the FFT is ( Dauxois & Ruffo 2008)
Their code works like this: the displacment at
point j of the lattice is y
j
.
The Matlab procedure ode45 is called for the
ode , where y is a (2N )-vector.
) ( 1 y fpu y

NL
NL
NL
N N N
N
N
N N
N
N
y y y
y y y y
y y y
y y
y y
y y

) ( ) 1 ( ) 2 (
) 2 ( ) 1 ( ) 3 ( ) 2 (
) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 1 (
) 2 ( ) (
...
) 2 ( ) 2 (
) 1 ( ) 1 (
2
...
2
2

So

NL y y y y N ) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 1 ( ) 1 ( 2

etc. This is how the 2
nd
order ode is
mapped to 1
st
order.
See Dauxois & Ruffo 2008 for the
FFT call in Matlab, to track the
harmonics
Heisenberg uncertainty principle
Time-Frequency duality
Nice animation: ipod.org

Another way to look at it: time and frequency are
dual, so, intuitively
brief duration wide spectrum
long duration narrow spectrum
Or measuring:
precise time poor frequency
precise frequency poor time
Or:
sharp change in time wide spectrum
slow change in time narrow spectrum


Star image in a telescope = Fourier
transform of the aperture
The wider the aperture, the
narrower the diffraction pattern
you need a big telescope to
resolve close stars