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Step response of a damped harmonic oscillator; curves are plotted for three values of μ = ω 1 = ω 0 √ 1 − ζ 2. Time is in units of the decay time τ = 1/(ζω 0). The value of the damping ratio ζ critically determines the behavior of the system. A damped harmonic oscillator can be:
A degree of freedom corresponds to one quantity that changes the configuration of the system, for example the angle of a pendulum, or the arc length traversed by a bead along a wire. If it is possible to find from the constraints as many independent variables as there are degrees of freedom, these can be used as generalized coordinates. [5]
This is no passing metaphor; a weight on a spring is described by exactly the same second order differential equation as an RLC circuit and for all the properties of the one system there will be found an analogous property of the other. The mechanical property answering to the resistor in the circuit is friction in the spring–weight system.
The quantum harmonic oscillator is the quantum-mechanical analog of the classical harmonic oscillator. Because an arbitrary smooth potential can usually be approximated as a harmonic potential at the vicinity of a stable equilibrium point , it is one of the most important model systems in quantum mechanics.
The dynamical symmetry group of the n dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator is the special unitary group SU(n). As an example, the number of infinitesimal generators of the corresponding Lie algebras of SU(2) and SU(3) are three and eight respectively.
A simple interpretation of Hamiltonian mechanics comes from its application on a one-dimensional system consisting of one nonrelativistic particle of mass m. The value (,) of the Hamiltonian is the total energy of the system, in this case the sum of kinetic and potential energy, traditionally denoted T and V, respectively.
In physics, Liouville's theorem, named after the French mathematician Joseph Liouville, is a key theorem in classical statistical and Hamiltonian mechanics.It asserts that the phase-space distribution function is constant along the trajectories of the system—that is that the density of system points in the vicinity of a given system point traveling through phase-space is constant with time.
A parametric oscillator is a harmonic oscillator whose physical properties vary with time. The equation of such an oscillator is + + = This equation is linear in ().By assumption, the parameters and depend only on time and do not depend on the state of the oscillator.