The Turán Problem and Its Dual for Positive Definite Functions Supported on a Ball in $${\mathbb {R}}^d$$

The Turán problem for an open ball of radius r centered at the origin in \({\mathbb {R}}^d\) consists in computing the supremum of the integrals of positive definite functions compactly supported on that ball and taking the value 1 at the origin. Siegel proved, in the 1930s that this supremum is equal to \(2^{-d}\) mutiplied by the Lebesgue measure of the ball and is reached by a multiple of the self-convolution of the indicator function of the ball of radius r/2. Several proofs of this result are known and, in this paper, we will provide a new proof of it based on the notion of “dual Turán problem”, a related maximization problem involving positive definite distributions. We provide, in particular, an explicit construction of the Fourier transform of a maximizer for the dual Turán problem. This approach to the problem provides a direct link between certain aspects of the theory of frames in Fourier analysis and the Turán problem. In particular, as an intermediary step needed for our main result, we construct new families of Parseval frames, involving Bessel functions, on the interval [0, 1].