The wave front set of the Wigner distribution and instantaneous frequency (Q2428476)

The frequency of a character \(f(t)=e^{2\pi i t\cdot \xi_0}\) is defined to be \(\xi_0\) and one has \(\xi_0=\langle \hat{f},\, \xi\rangle/\langle \hat{f},\, 1\rangle\) in the sense of distributions. The {\textit{instantaneous frequency}} of a slowly varying function can be defined more generally as the normalized gradient of the phase function: \[ \frac{1}{2\pi} \nabla {\text{arg}}\, f(t)=\frac{1}{2\pi} (\partial_j\, {\text{arg}} f(t))_{j=1}^d\, . \] The authors prove a time-frequency version of this formula, expressed as \[ \frac{1}{2\pi} \nabla {\text{arg}}\, f(t) = \frac{\langle W_f(t,\cdot),\xi\rangle}{\langle W_f(t,\cdot),\, 1\rangle} \] in which \(W(f)\) denotes the Wigner distribution of \(f\). The {\textit{slowly varying}} hypothesis can be quantified fairly precisely in this case by membership in the Sobolev space \(H^{d/2+1+\epsilon}\) of functions whose Fourier transforms are square integrable against the weight \((1+|\xi|^2)^{d/2+1+\epsilon}\). In this case, the right hand side of the Wigner inner product ratio is equal to \(\int_{\mathbb{R}^d} \xi\, W_f(t,\xi)\, d\xi/\int_{\mathbb{R}^d} W_f(t,\xi)\, d\xi\). The Wigner formula for instantaneous frequency is also shown to apply whenever \(f\in \mathcal{F}\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R}^d)\), the space of Fourier transforms of compactly supported distributions, and when \(f=\exp(\pi i t\cdot At) h(t)\) for a symmetric matrix \(A\) and \(h\in\mathcal{F}\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R}^d)\). Establishing this formula rigorously boils down to establishing mapping properties of wave-front sets under the Wigner transform. In particular, it is shown that the restriction \(W_f(t,\cdot)\) is a well-defined distribution when \(f\in WFW^{\neq}(\mathbb{R}^d)\), the space of tempered distributions for which the wave front set of the Wigner distribution does not contain vectors purely in the time direction. Recall that the wave front set \(WF(u)\) of \(u\) is defined as the complement in \(\mathbb{R}^d\times (\mathbb{R}^d\setminus\{0\})\) of the set on which the Fourier transform of a localization of \(u\) about \(x\) decays rapidly in a cone containing \(\xi\). Recall also that \(W_{f,g}(t,\xi)\) is the Fourier transform of \(f(t+\cdot/2)\, \overline{g}(t-\cdot/2)\) evaluated at \(\xi\) and \(W_{f}=W_{f,f}\) is a (generally non-positive) mathematical attempt to define a time-frequency density of \(f\).