Frequency-frequency correlations of single-trajectory spectral densities of Gaussian processes

Abstract

We investigate the stochastic behavior of the single-trajectory spectral density S ( ω , T ) of several Gaussian stochastic processes, i.e., Brownian motion, the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, the Brownian gyrator model and fractional Brownian motion, as a function of the frequency ω and the observation time T . We evaluate in particular the variance and the frequency-frequency correlation of S ( ω , T ) for different values of ω. We show that these properties exhibit different behaviors for different physical cases and can therefore be used as a sensitive probe discriminating between different kinds of random motion. These results may prove quite useful in the analysis of experimental and numerical data.