Magnitude and Phase
In using the Laplace, Z-, or Fourier transforms, the frequency spectrum is complex, describing the magnitude and phase of a signal, or of the response of a system, as a function of frequency. In many applications, phase information is not important. By discarding the phase information it is possible to simplify the information in a frequency domain representation to generate a frequency spectrum or spectral density. A spectrum analyzer is a device that displays the spectrum.
The power spectral density is a frequency-domain description that can be applied to a large class of signals that are neither periodic nor square-integrable; to have a power spectral density, a signal needs only to be the output of a wide-sense stationary random process.
Read more about this topic: Frequency Domain
Famous quotes containing the words magnitude and/or phase:
“War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.”
—Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)