The classical umbral calculus, and the flow of a Drinfeld module

Abstract

David Goss developed a very general Fourier transform in additive harmonic analysis in the function field setting. In order to introduce the Fourier transform for continuous characteristic $p$ valued functions on $\mathbb{Z}_p$, Goss introduced and studied an analogue of flows in finite characteristic. In this paper, we use another approach to study flows in finite characteristic. We recast the notion of a flow in the language of the classical umbral calculus, which allows to generalize the formula for flows first proved by Goss to a more general setting. We study duality between flows using the classical umbral calculus, and show that the duality notion introduced by Goss seems a natural one. We also formulate a question of Goss about the exact relationship between two flows of a Drinfeld module in the language of the classical umbral calculus, and give a partial answer to it.