Nonlinear Fourier transform and probability distributions

Abstract

The paper describes some probabilistic and combinatorial aspects of the nonlinear Fourier transform associated with the AKNS-ZS problems. In the first of the two main results, we show that a family of polytopes that appear in a power expansion of the nonlinear Fourier transforms is distributed according to the beta probability distribution. We establish this result by studying an Euler type discretization of the nonlinear Fourier transform. This approach provides our second main result, discovering a novel discrete probability distribution that approximates the beta distribution. The numbers of alternating ordered partitions of an integer into distinct parts are distributed according to our new distribution. Using another discretization, we also find a formula for the values of alternating ordered partitions into non-distinct parts. We find a connection between this discretization and the multinomial distribution.