Nyquist

The Nyquist frequency, named after the Swedish-American engineer Harry Nyquist or the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, is half the sampling frequency of a discrete signal processing system.[1][2] It is sometimes called the folding frequency, or the cut-off frequency of a sampling system.[3]

The sampling theorem shows that aliasing can be avoided if the Nyquist frequency is greater than the bandwidth, or maximum component frequency, of the signal being sampled.

The Nyquist frequency should not be confused with the Nyquist rate, which is the lower bound of the sampling frequency that satisfies the Nyquist sampling criterion for a given signal or family of signals. This lower bound is twice the bandwidth or maximum component frequency of the signal. Nyquist rate, as commonly used with respect to sampling, is a property of a continuous-time signal, not of a system, whereas Nyquist frequency is a property of a discrete-time system, not of a signal.

The aliasing problem

In principle, a Nyquist frequency just larger than the signal bandwidth is sufficient to allow perfect reconstruction of the signal from the samples. However, this reconstruction requires an unrealizable filter that passes some frequencies unchanged while suppressing all others completely (commonly called a brickwall filter). When realizable filters are used, some degree of oversampling is necessary to accommodate the practical constraints on anti-aliasing filters. That is, frequencies close to the Nyquist frequency may be distorted in the sampling and reconstruction process, so the bandwidth should be kept below the Nyquist frequency by some margin that depends on the actual filters used.

For example, audio CDs have a sampling frequency of 44100 Hz. The Nyquist frequency is therefore 22050 Hz, which is an upper bound on the highest frequency the data can unambiguously represent. If the chosen anti-aliasing filter (a low-pass filter in this case) has a transition band of 2000 Hz, then the cut-off frequency should be no higher than 20050 Hz to yield a signal with negligible power at frequencies of 22050 Hz and greater.

To avoid aliasing, the Nyquist frequency must be strictly greater than the maximum frequency component within the signal. If the signal contains a frequency component at precisely the Nyquist frequency then the corresponding component of the sample values cannot have sufficient information to reconstruct the Nyquist component in the continuous-time signal because of phase ambiguity. In such a case, there would be an infinite number of possible and different sinusoids (of varying amplitude and phase) of the Nyquist frequency component that are represented by the discrete samples.

Sources

Nyquist frequency. (2008, April 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:13, May 5, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nyquist_frequency&oldid=204954785]