2 - Damped Harmonic Oscillator

Summary

Here, we add damping to the harmonic oscillator, and explore the role of the resulting new time scale in the solutions to the equations of motion.Specifically, the ratio of damping to oscillatory time scale can be used to identify very different regimes of motion: under-, critically-, and over-damped.Then driving forces are added, we consider the effect those have on the different flavors of forcing already in place.The main physical example (beyond springs attached to masses in dashpots) is electrical, sinusoidally driven RLC circuits provide a nice, experimentally accessible test case.On the mathematical side, the chapter serves as a thinly-veiled introduction to Fourier series and the Fourier transform.