FFT of a real symmetric vector is not real and symmetric

Question

I am having a hard time understanding what should be a simple concept. I have constructed a vector in MATLAB that is real and symmetric. When I take the FFT in MATLAB, the result has a significant imaginary component, even though the symmetry rules of the Fourier transform say that the FT of a real symmetric function should also be real and symmetric. My example code:

N = 1 + 2^8;
k = linspace(-1,1,N);

V = exp(-abs(k));

Vf1 = fft(fftshift(V));
Vf2 = fft(ifftshift(V));
Vf3 = ifft(fftshift(V));
Vf4 = ifft(ifftshift(V));
Vf5 = fft(V);
Vf6 = ifft(V);

disp([isreal(Vf1) isreal(Vf2) isreal(Vf3) isreal(Vf4) isreal(Vf5) isreal(Vf6)])

Result:

0 0 0 0 0 0

No combinations of (i)fft or (i)fftshift result in a real symmetric vector. I've tried with both even and odd N (N = 2^8 vs. N = 1+2^8).

I did try looking at k+flip(k) and there are some residuals on the order of eps(1), but the residuals are also symmetric and the imaginary part of the FFT is not coming out as fuzz on the order of eps(1), but rather with magnitude comparable to the real part.

What blindingly obvious thing am I missing?

Blindingly obvious thing I was missing:

The FFT is not an integral over all space, so it assumes a periodic signal. Above, I am duplicating the last point in the period when I choose an even N, and so there is no way to shift it around to put the zero frequency at the beginning without fractional indexing, which does not exist.

A word about my choice of k. It is not arbitrary. The actual problem I am trying to solve is to generate a model FTIR interferogram which I will then FFT to get a spectrum. k is the distance that the interferometer travels which gets transformed to frequency in wavenumbers. In the real problem there will be various scaling factors so that the generating function V will yield physically meaningful numbers.

Answer 1

It's

Vf = fftshift(fft(ifftshift(V)));

That is, you need ifftshift in time-domain so that samples are interpreted as those of a symmetric function, and then fftshift in frequency-domain to again make symmetry apparent.

This only works for N odd. For N even, the concept of a symmetric function does not make sense: there is no way to shift the signal so that it is symmetric with respect to the origin (the origin would need to be "between two samples", which is impossible).

For your example V, the above code gives Vf real and symmetric. The following figure has been generated with semilogy(Vf), so that small as well as large values can be seen. (Of course, you could modify the horizontal axis so that the graph is centered at 0 frequency as it should; but anyway the graph is seen to be symmetric.)