Smooth PONS (Q5929345)

PONS stands for `Prometheus orthonormal system', a trademark of Prometheus Incorporated. The original PONS construction gave an orthonormal set \( \{p_{n}\}\) of functions taking values in \(\{0,\pm 1\}\) that are rapidly computable, but, importantly, PONS elements are well-localized: \(|p_{n}(x)|\leq \frac{C}{(1+|x|)^{1/2}}\) and \(|\widehat{p}_{n}(\xi)|\leq \frac{C}{(1+|\xi |)^{1/2}}\), a tradeoff which is optimal when \(C\) is independent of \(n\). This tradeoff is optimal in the sense that one cannot have \(|p_{n}(x)|\leq \frac{C}{(1+|x|)^{p}}\) and \(|\widehat{p}_{n}(\xi)|\leq \frac{C}{ (1+|\xi |)^{p}}\) for \(p\) strictly larger than \(1/2\). The original PONS elements are obtained by uniformly subdividing the unit interval into \(2^{n}\) equal subintervals and defining \(p_{n}\) (resp. \(q_{n}\)) to equal \(\pm 1\) on the \(i\)th subinterval according to whether the \(i\)th coefficient of the standard degree \(2^{n}-1\) Rudin-Shapiro polynomial \(P_{n}\) (resp. \(Q_{n}\)) is \(\pm 1\). Thus the PONS inherit desirable properties of of the Rudin-Shapiro polynomials, in particular, orthogonality and that their crest factors -- the ratio of their \(L^{\infty }\)-norm to their \(L^{2}\)-norm is at most \(\sqrt{2}\). However, transplanting the Rudin-Shapiro polynomials in this way does not result in a complete set. The rest of the PONS construction comes from extending the Rudin-Shapiro recursion relation to include extra `sign flips' at each step in order to establish completeness. The purpose of the present paper is to extend this PONS construction to obtain an orthonormal basis of smooth functions that retains the ideal inverse square root decay in time and frequency along with bounded crest factors. The basic observation is that one can employ the same sequence of sign flips used in the PONS construction to transform any orthonormal basis into another. If one starts with the Fourier basis (thought of as a basis for \(L^{2}\) of a subinterval of the real line) then the PONS construction yields a basis with such properties. The basis elements are not smooth on the whole real line because they are cut-off at the endpoints of the interval.