The power spectrum of the Mellin transformation with applications to scaling of physical quantities

Abstract

The Mellin transform is used to diagonalize the dilation operator in a manner analogous to the use of the Fourier transform to diagonalize the translation operator. A power spectrum is also introduced for the Mellin transform which is analogous to that used for the Fourier transform. Unlike the case for the power spectrum of the Fourier transform where sharp peaks correspond to periodicities in translation, the peaks in the power spectrum of the Mellin transform correspond to periodicities in magnification. A theorem of Wiener‐Khinchine type is introduced for the Mellin transform power spectrum. It is expected that the new power spectrum will play an important role extracting meaningful information from noisy data and will thus be a useful complement to the use of the ordinary Fourier power spectrum.