Fourier Transforms of Finite Chirps

Chirps arise in many signal processing applications. While chirps have been extensively studied both as functions over the real line and the integers, less attention has been paid to the study of chirps over finite groups. We study the existence and properties of chirps over finite cyclic groups of integers. In particular, we introduce a new definition of a finite chirp which is slightly more general than those that have previously been used. We explicitly compute the discrete Fourier transforms of these chirps, yielding results that are number-theoretic in nature. As a consequence of these results, we determine the degree to which the elements of certain finite tight frames are well-distributed.