Transformation of the linear difference equation into a system of the first order difference equations

Abstract

The transformation of the Nth- order linear difference equation into a system of the first order difference equations is presented. The proposed transformation gives possibility to get new forms of the N-dimensional system of the first order equations that can be useful for analysis of the solutions of the Nth- order difference equations. In particular, for the third-order linear difference equation the nonlinear second-order difference equation that plays the same role as the Riccati equation for second-order linear difference equation is obtained. The new form of the N-dimensional system of first order equations can be also used for finding the WKB solutions of the linear difference equation with coefficients that vary sufficiently slowly with index.