Lecture 24

Harmonic oscillator I: Introduction

Having analyzed the motion of particles in different situations, let us now focus on a very special
kind of motion: that of oscillations. This is a very general kind of motion seen around you: A
partial moving around the bottom of a cup, a pendulum swinging, a clamped rod vibrating about
its equilibrium position or a string vibrating. A good first approximation to these motions is the
simple harmonic oscillation. Let us see what does that mean? At a stable equilibrium point, the
force on a body is zero; not only that, as a particle moves away from equilibrium, its potential
energy increases and it is pulled back towards the equilibrium point. Thus around a stable
equilibrium point x0 (for simplicity, let me take one-dimensional motion) the potential energy
can be written as

Since at an equilibrium point, the force F(x0 ) on the particle vanishes,

Further, because (x) has a minimum at x0 , this gives

Writing

I get

and the corresponding equation of motion for a mass m as

As I will show a little later, the solution of this equation is of the form

and is known as the simple harmonic motion. It is the simplest possible motion about a stable
equilibrium point. Of course if k = 0 , the force will have higher order dependence on y and the
motion becomes more complicated. Further, even if
, if we include higher order terms, the
resulting motion will become more complex. It is for this reason that we call the motion above
simple harmonic motion. We will see that this itself is quite a rich system. A system that
performs simple harmonic motion is called a simple harmonic oscillator. A prototype if this
system is the spring-mass system with k being the spring constant and m the mass of the block on
the spring (figure 1).

In these lectures, I will talk about the motion of this system and how it is represented by a phasor
diagram. I will then introduce damping into the system. The simplest damping is a constant
opposing force like friction and next level is a damping proportional to the velocity. Then I will
apply a force on the system and see the motion of force damped and undamped oscillator. Along
the way, I will solve many examples to show wide applicability of simple harmonic motion.
To start with let us take our prototype system of mass and spring with unstretched length of the
spring

so that equilibrium distance of the mass is

. Now when the mass is displaced about

by x in the positive direction, the force is in negative direction so that

or

This is the general equation for simple harmonic oscillator. Recall that in such cases we assume a
solution of the form

and substitute it in the equation to get

Since this equation is true for all times, we should have

Thus there are two solution

and
. A general solution is then given in terms of a linear
combination of the two solutions so let us write

Since

is real it is clear that

. Thus

If we take A = AR + iAI , where both AR and AI are real then the solution above takes the form

which alternatively can be written as

Another equivalent way of writing the solution is

or
where

A is the maximum distance that the mass travels during a simple harmonic oscillation. It is
known as the amplitude of oscillation. The quantity

is known as the phase with being

the initial phase. All the boxed equations above are equivalent ways of writing the solution for a
harmonic oscillator. The general graph depicting the solution
figure 2.

Thus A is the maximum distance traveled by the block and

is given in

gives its initial displacement.

The constants C and D or A and are determined by the initial conditions, i.e. initial
displacement and velocity of the mass. In general any two conditions are enough to determine
the constants.
For a displacement

the velocity of the mass is given by

Thus the maximum possible magnitude of the velocity is 0 A . The general displacement and the
corresponding velocity of the mass with respect to time are displayed in figure 3.

It is clear from the figure that for a given displacement, the velocity is such that when
displacement is at its maximum or minimum, the velocity is zero and when the displacement is
zero, the velocity has the largest magnitude. This is physically clear. When the spring is
compressed or stretched to its maximum, the particle is at rest and when the particle passes
through the equilibrium point, its speed is at its maximum. Let me now solve a few examples.
Example 1: In a spring-mass system k = 16 N/m and m = 1 kg . If the mass is displaced by .05 m
and released from rest, find its subsequent motion.

Using the initial conditions I get

x(0)= D = 0 .05m

So the solution is
with the maximum speed of 0.2m/s . The solution x(t) is
plotted in figure 4. Also plotted there is the velocity v(t) of the mass as it performs its motion.
Notice that from the x(t) curve, the velocity can be easily plotted by taking its slope.

Let me now show you how the solution changes when the initial conditions are different.
Suppose instead of pulling the mass and releasing it, I give it an initial velocity of .1m/s toward
the right from the equilibrium. In that case

So
. Obviously the maximum speed in this case is 0.1m/s, that given in the
beginning. The solution looks like shown in figure 5.

Third possibility of initial conditions is when I take the mass to a displacement of .05m and push
it towards the equilibrium point with a speed of .1m/sec. Then

Thus the solution is

. If we wish to express this as

then

and

This gives
and
. The maximum speed in this case is vmax = 4 x
0.056 = 0.224m/s . So the graph of the motion looks like that shown in figure 6.

From the graph it is very clear that initially the speed of the particle increases in the negative
direction and then the particle starts slowing down, stopping at the full compression of the
spring, as is clear from the plot of its displacement.
If in the case studied just now, the mass was thrown out instead of being pushed in, it would have
a positive velocity to start with but the speed would be decreasing at that moment. Then the mass
will travel out to its maximum displacement and would then turn back. The general plot of
displacement and velocity versus time would then look as in figure 7. I will leave it for you to
work out the numbers for amplitude and initial phase.

Example 2: In the second example I show that about any stable equilibrium point, the motion to
a good degree is simple harmonic. let us take two changes of 10 C each at a distance of half a
meter so that is a positive charge of 5 C is kept at the centre, its experiences no force (see figure
8). The 5 C charge is confined to move along the line joining the two changes. If displaced by a
small distance from its equilibrium position, what kind of motion does it perform?

When the 5 C is displaced to the right by x, the force on it is

In obtaining the force above, we have used the binomial theorem to expand
. Since the
force is proportional to the displacement and in direction opposite to it, the charge will perform
simple harmonic motion.
Let me now look at some other examples, going beyond the spring-mass system.

Example 3: A disc of mass M and radius R is hanging on a will about a point on its periphery
(see figure 9). If it is displaced from its initial position by small angle
subsequent motion.

and released, find its

This is a case where a rigid body is moving under distributed forces so we use angular
momentum to describe its motion. The equation of its motion therefore is

By transformation theorem,

So the equation of motion becomes

This means that in general the motion of the disc would be simple harmonic and will be given as

The initial conditions in this case give C = 0 and D = 0 . Therefore the solution in the present

case is

Example 4: As the final example here, let me take a particle moving in a potential
.The potential has a minimum at x0 given by

You can yourself check that the second derivative at this point is positive and its value is 8B. For
very small displacements x about this point we have the change in the potential energy given as

which by binomial theorem or the Taylor series expansion leads to

This gives an equivalent spring constant of k=8B and frequency of oscillation

Having solved these examples I now wish to discuss a very important topic of phase and phase
difference in a simple-harmonic motion. I will spend some time discussion phasor diagrams give
a feel for the phase.
Phase and Phase difference in simple harmonic motion : In general the solution of a simple
harmonic equation is

As mentioned earlier A is known as the amplitude and

as the phase. is a constant
depending on the initial conditions and we call it the phase constant. Let us now see how does
the motion look for different values of the phase constant . The displacement versus time plots
for different signs of the phase constant are shown in figure 10.

For > 0 the motion at t = 0 begin at a value or phase angle that it would have slightly later in
the

case. On the other hand, for < 0 the motion is such that a particular displacement for

the
case is reached at a later time. The motion lags behind the
you to figure out yourself how the corresponding velocities are related.

motion. I leave it for

Let us now at the special case of

. In this case I get

and for

So you see that a phase difference of 180o, whether position or negative, means the same thing. I
would like you to plot the displacement versus time graph for these particular cases. For the
phases in between you should see for yourself how the displacements at t = 0 are different from
case.
A good way of visualizing the simple harmonic motion is the phasor or vector diagram. I discuss
that next.

Phasor or vector diagram: A nice geometric way of looking at various quantities in a simple
harmonic motion is the vector or a phasor diagram. You may have seen it in your 12th grade while
studying AC circuits. Let me show you how we represent
in a geometric way.
You see that displacement in this case is the x component of a vector making an angle t from
the x-axis. Thus the displacement is represented as shown in figure 11. The motion described by
is thus given by the projection of a vector of length A, rotating counterclockwise
at a rate , on the x-axis.

Let us now see how the velocity

and the acceleration will be represented in this scheme? The
velocity and acceleration are given as

The displacement, velocity and acceleration are shown in the phasor diagram in figure 12. A
general feature that we observe from this phase diagram is that the velocity vector is always
ahead (measuring counterclockwise) of the displacement vector and the acceleration vector is at
(ahead or behind?) the displacement.

So far we have discussed the simple case of

. What about the general case of

. This is also equally simple. All we have to do is keep the initial position of
the vector at t = 0 at an angle from the x-axis and start rotating it from there. The velocity
vector and the acceleration vector are then going to be given at
above. This is shown in figure 13.

and from it, as discussed

Recall that in the middle of this lecture I had solved a spring-mass problem with different initial
conditions. I would like you to make the phasor diagram to represent the motion of the mass in
many different situations like those considered above. Do not solve for x(t) to start with, just
make the phasor diagram directly to see if you have got a feel for motion under different
conditions.
Finally in this lecture I look at the energy of a system performing simple harmonic motion. The
potential energy U(x) and the kinetic energies T are

The total energy E is of course a sum of the two. With

Since

, we get

this gives

Thus the energy depends on the square of the amplitude. This makes sense because if I stretch a
spring by A, the energy stored in it is
. On releasing the mass it performs oscillations of
amplitude A. Thus you see that amplitude A immediately implies a total energy given above.
I have now set up all the basic concepts of simple harmonic motion. In the coming lectures I will
introduce damping in the system and see how it evolves.