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The harmonic oscillator model is very important in physics, because any mass subject to a force in stable equilibrium acts as a harmonic oscillator for small vibrations. Harmonic oscillators occur widely in nature and are exploited in many manmade devices, such as clocks and radio circuits. They are the source of virtually all sinusoidal ...
In mechanics and physics, simple harmonic motion (sometimes abbreviated as SHM) is a special type of periodic motion an object experiences by means of a restoring force whose magnitude is directly proportional to the distance of the object from an equilibrium position and acts towards the equilibrium position.
Natural frequency, measured in terms of eigenfrequency, is the rate at which an oscillatory system tends to oscillate in the absence of disturbance. A foundational example pertains to simple harmonic oscillators, such as an idealized spring with no energy loss wherein the system exhibits constant-amplitude oscillations with a constant frequency.
Though our starting example was the harmonic oscillator, all the math up to this point has been completely general for a particle subject to a conservative force. This formula can be generalized for any one-dimensional physical system by plugging in the corresponding potential energy function.
In physics, a system with a set of conservative forces and an equilibrium point can be approximated as a harmonic oscillator near equilibrium. An example of this is the Lennard-Jones potential, where the potential is given by: = [() ()]
This is a form of the simple harmonic oscillator, and there is always conservation of energy. When μ > 0 , all initial conditions converge to a globally unique limit cycle. Near the origin x = d x d t = 0 , {\displaystyle x={\tfrac {dx}{dt}}=0,} the system is unstable, and far from the origin, the system is damped.
Figure 2: A simple harmonic oscillator with small periodic damping term given by ¨ + ˙ + =, =, ˙ =; =.The numerical simulation of the original equation (blue solid line) is compared with averaging system (orange dashed line) and the crude averaged system (green dash-dotted line). The left plot displays the solution evolved in time and ...
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.