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A Green's Function By Any Other Name (Green's Functions,
Impulse Response, Propagators And All Of That)
By Jon Lederman | February 18th 2009 02:50 AM | Print |
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It's always satisfying to see concepts in the sciences, which reappear with Revenue Code that's educated over 300 million
varied nomenclature across fields and disciplines.  There are countless people.
examples but one that always stood out for me is the concept of Green's
You can help with a tax-deductible donation toda
functions.This is such an interesting an important concept in all of pure and and 100 percent of your gift will go toward our
Jon Lederman
applied science.  And to explain it will require some exploration of another programs, no salaries or offices.
interesting idea called a delta function and another important concept,
Search This Blog linearity.

 What is a Green's function?  Scientists and engineers often work with Popular Now New Comments Events

differential equations or difference equations. to describe the behavior of some theoretical or applied 1. Summer = Work
model.  A differential equation is what the name implies - an equation that describes the behavior of 2. Weekend Science: In Vitro Tests Show
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the model to small differences of something or some quantity such as time or space.  It's always Clumping
easier to start with a discrete environment and then move to the continuum via a limiting approach.   3. With No Evidence Of Harm, Taxpayers Will
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A difference equation is the discrete analog of a differential equation and effectively comprises a Powder But That Money Will Never Happen
recurrence relation, for example: y[n]=c*(x[n]-x[n-1]), where x[n] is some discrete function and c is
some constant.  If we know the initial conditions on x[n] (i.e., x[0]), we can determine x[n]n for all n Links Hot Topics
using this recurrence relation.  
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A differential equation expresses just such a recurrence relation in the continuous case through the
use of derivatives.  For example, dx/dt (f(t))=c*f(t).  This elementary differential equation says that Interesting insights from outside Science
the time derivative of the function is equal to the function itself multiplied by some constant.  The 2.0
solution is an exponential, x(t)=e^ct.  

The standard spiel on Green's functions is that they represent the inverse of some linear differential
operator, which can be used to solve a related differential equation with a source term by invoking
Green's identities.  In effect the Green's function undoes action of the differential operator.  If one
considers a discrete space, a Green's function is more or less the continuous analog of the inverse of
a non-singular matrix.  
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But, there's a much more utilitarian and intuitive description that I prefer that relates to the analogous effects of debt during COVID-19
applications of "Green's Functions" in applied sciences such as engineering.  A Green's function more
represents the "response" of a system to a special type of input - namely a singular type of input.  
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What do I mean by a singular input?  I am referring here to a delta function.   Really the term 'delta 14,477 followers
function' is a misnomer.  It isn't a function at all but rather a mathematical abstraction referred to as a
distribution.  Without getting bogged down in the highly technical nature of distribution theory, a
delta function can be thought of a mathematical model for something in the world that is highly Follow Page Subscribe
concentrated in time or space.  That is, this thing occurs or happens over a very small time or space
dimension.  For example, if there is an amount of mass concentrated over a very small distance a
delta function d(x) represents a function that is sharply peaked at 0.  

It is often useful to start with a specific function such as a Gaussian and imagine the limiting case as

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7/24/23, 3:13 AM A Green's Function By Any Other Name (Green's Functions, Impulse Response, Propagators And All Of That) | Science 2.0
the width of that function shrinks.   We imagine a limiting case in which the function becomes more
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and more sharply peaked and less spread out in space.  In order to get something finite in an
integral, as the width of the delta function shrinks, the height must approach infinity.  Some prefer to
think of a delta function as 0 everywhere but infinite at one point.  This is actually formally incorrect
as the aforementioned "function" is of measure 0 and contributes nothing to an integral.  It is best to
think of a delta function as the limiting case of a narrowly peaked function as the width of that
function approaches 0.  

Another concept that is often thrown around in pop culture and worth a brief explanation is linearity.
 People like to talk about something as linear or non-linear but what does this concept really mean?
 It is an important concept to flesh out because it is perhaps the most utilized idea in all of theoretical
and applied science.  

In short, we don't know what to do with all but the simplest non-linear systems.  What to do?
 Linearize the system over some finite region and solve within that region.  Repeat this procedure ad
infinitum to obtain a global solution.  In the loosest sense, linearity means something called the
superposition principle applies.  This means that I can study the behavior of the system of interest to
different inputs and for each one arrive at a respective outputs.  I can then add the totality of outputs.
 This sum of the totality of outputs will represent the response of the system to the totality of inputs.
 This is a beautifully simply but remarkably powerful idea that allows one to study a system in simple
isolated cases and be assured that the response of the system to more complex inputs is simply the
sum of the responses to the simple inputs.  

For those who are a bit more mathematically inclined, linearity in a more formal sense actually implies
two things: (1) superposition; (2) scaling.  I already described the superposition principle.  The
scaling property is this:  L(a*x)=a*L(x).  This simply means that the output of the system to a scaled
input is simply the scaling factor multiplied by the response of the system to the input.  

A slightly hand-wavy but useful way to think about delta functions is this.  We can take any function
and decompose it into a superposition or sum of delta functions, one for each point of the function.
 In addition, each of the delta functions in the sum multiplied by a weight.  What is the weight?  The
weight is the value of the function we are seeking to decompose at the very point it corresponds to.
 Again, it is easier to think of a discrete space first.

 Imagine, a discrete function indexed by some variable such as time, which has the value 4 at time 0,
the value 2 at time 1 and the value 3 at time 2.  This discrete function can be decomposed into the
sum of three delta functions: 4*delta[t]+2*delta[t-1]+3*delta[t-2].  By the way, these are a special
type of delta function for discrete variables called Kronecker delta functions, but the concept not the
name is the important thing.

Imagine now that the time variable becomes continuous.  Then, the Kronecker delta's will become
something called a Dirac delta (which is the continuous analog of a Kronecker delta), all differences
will become derivatives and all sums will become integrals.  Thus, a continuous function can be
represented as the integral of a linear superposition of Dirac delta functions, each multiplied by a
weight representing the value of the continuous function at each respective point.  

So, how does all of this abstraction relate to Green's functions.  As suggested earlier, all that a
Green's function represents is the "response" of our system to a delta function.  If we know this kernel
of information, we can automatically know the response of the system modeled by a differential
equation to an arbitrary source function.  Why?  Because any function can be decomposed into a
linear superposition of delta functions, we can correspondingly construct the response of the system
we are studying to the linear superposition of the entirety of responses to the delta functions!  

I like to think of it this way.  A Green's function represents the DNA, fabric or structure of the system
under study.  It describes the response of the system to a very special input - a delta function, which
in some sense is the purest response of the system for all other responses can be determined by
superimposing the responses to a collective sum of delta functions.  Once we know the Green's
function of a linear differential equation or a system, we know a lot!  It's a small piece of information
with grand consequences.  
So how does this relate to the original idea of this discussion - the reappearance of similar ideas
across disciplines? Let's look at how Green's functions manifest in various disciplines - but may in
fact be called by something else.

Electrical engineers like to invoke the concept of an impulse response. This idea is used heavily in
analog and digital circuit theory and analog and digital signal processing.   An impulse response in
nothing more than the Green's function of a system, except it is called an impulse response not a
Green's function.  The idea has some very powerful consequences relating to something known as the
convolution theorem, which tells us that convolution of two functions in the time or space domain is
merely multiplication in Fourier space.  But that's another story.  
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In signal processing the impulse response represents more or less the DNA of the linear system under
study.  With it, we can know the response of the system to an arbitrarily complex function.

In physics Green's functions are called by their rightful name.  They are very important in classical
electrodynamics, for example, in solving certain problems in electrostatics and electrodynamics.  I
won't discuss these in any depth here, but one very interesting problem relates to notions of causality
regarding how the electromagnetic field propagates in space.  One arrives at something unfortunately
called the retarded Green's function, which describes how radiation moves through space and time at
a finite speed - the speed of light.

Green's functions also manifest in solving many problems in quantum mechanics.  To invoke a rather
lofty example, but one that nicely ties together how this concept spans so many discourses in the
science, there is the idea of a propagator.  The propagator rears its head in the notoriously abstract
area of relativistic quantum mechanics, a.k.a quantum field theory.  In quantum mechanics a particle
such as an electron or a photon is described by a mathematical object known as the wave function.
 This concept necessarily arises due to empirical nature of things we call particles as waves.  Electrons
exhibit wavelike non-local behavior and interference just as classical waves like water waves and the
electromagnetic field.  
The wave function captures this idea.  Of course I am omitting the real essence of quantum
mechanics, the probabilistic nature of measurement, operator theory, eigenfunctions, the uncertainty
relation and all of that for now!  In any case, we'd like to study the dynamical behavior of the wave
function - i.e., how it evolves over time.  The thing that describes this is the propagator for the wave
function.  The propagator though is really just a Green's function, aptly called a propagator.  And, just
like all the examples discussed, it represents the response of our quantum system, more or less, to a
delta function input.  

In more physical terms, since the propagator relates to the evolution of the wave function over time,
the propagator represents the probability amplitude for a particle to move from one spacetime point
to another (the amplitude squared represents the probability).  This brings up something called the
Huygen's principle, which attempts to explain how classical waves propagate.  The basic idea is that
every point on a wave front functions as the source of a new wave.  By adding the linear superposition
of this infinite set of generated waves, the overall propagation of the wave is described.  This is a very
useful concept in understanding diffraction of classical waves.

This brings up another useful idea.  The notion of a propagator and Green's functions is merely
expressing the idea of causality.  That is, something happening at one time will affect something at a
later time.  

I always believe that cross-pollination from different areas of study is extremely productive an
enlightening.  It's satisfying to see how the same concepts can be applied perhaps in slightly different
forms with different nomenclature across fields and discourses.  Green's functions, impulse
responses and propagators all capture particular instances of one unifying idea made possible
through the power and simplicity of linearity.

Jon Lederman

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