  Motivated by recent work on atomic norms in inverse problems, we propose a
new approach to line spectral estimation that provides theoretical guarantees
for the mean-squared-error (MSE) performance in the presence of noise and
without knowledge of the model order. We propose an abstract theory of
denoising with atomic norms and specialize this theory to provide a convex
optimization problem for estimating the frequencies and phases of a mixture of
complex exponentials. We show that the associated convex optimization problem
can be solved in polynomial time via semidefinite programming (SDP). We also
show that the SDP can be approximated by an l1-regularized least-squares
problem that achieves nearly the same error rate as the SDP but can scale to
much larger problems. We compare both SDP and l1-based approaches with
classical line spectral analysis methods and demonstrate that the SDP
outperforms the l1 optimization which outperforms MUSIC, Cadzow's, and Matrix
Pencil approaches in terms of MSE over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios.
