No Arabic abstract
It is shown that the classical damped harmonic oscillator belongs to the family of fourth-order Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillators. It follows that the solutions to the damped harmonic oscillator equation make the Pais-Uhlenbeck action stationary. Two systematic approaches are given for deriving the Pais-Uhlenbeck action from the damped harmonic oscillator equation, and it may be possible to use these methods to identify stationary action principles for other dissipative systems which do not conform to Hamiltons principle. It is also shown that for every damped harmonic oscillator $x$, there exists a two-parameter family of dual oscillators $y$ satisfying the Pais-Uhlenbeck equation. The damped harmonic oscillator and any of its duals can be interpreted as a system of two coupled oscillators with atypical spring stiffnesses (not necessarily positive and real-valued). For overdamped systems, the resulting coupled oscillators should be physically achievable and may have engineering applications. Finally, a new physical interpretation is given for the optimal damping ratio $zeta=1/sqrt{2}$ in control theory.
We return to the description of the damped harmonic oscillator by means of a closed quantum theory with a general assessment of previous works, in particular the Bateman-Caldirola-Kanai model and a new model recently proposed by one of the authors. We show the local equivalence between the two models and argue that latter has better high energy behavior and is naturally connected to existing open-quantum-systems approaches.
A system obeying the harmonic oscillator equation of motion can be used as a force or proper acceleration sensor. In this short review we derive analytical expressions for the sensitivity of such sensors in a range of different situations, considering noise of thermal and measurement origins and a formalism for dealing with oscillators whose natural frequency $omega_0$ jitters. A special case where the sensitivity can be improved beyond the standard expressions and some applications with examples are also discussed.
Time evolution of a harmonic oscillator linearly coupled to a heat bath is compared for three classes of initial states for the bath modes - grand canonical ensemble, number states and coherent states. It is shown that for a wide class of number states the behavior of the oscillator is similar to the case of the equilibrium bath. If the bath modes are initially in coherent states, then the variances of the oscillator coordinate and momentum, as well as its entanglement to the bath, asymptotically approach the same values as for the oscillator at zero temperature and the average coordinate and momentum show a Brownian-like behavior. We derive an exact master equation for the characteristic function of the oscillator valid for arbitrary factorized initial conditions. In the case of the equilibrium bath this equation reduces to an equation of the Hu-Paz-Zhang type, while for the coherent states bath it leads to an exact stochastic master equation with a multiplicative noise.
An approximate solution is presented for simple harmonic motion in the presence of damping by a force which is a general power-law function of the velocity. The approximation is shown to be quite robust, allowing for a simple way to investigate amplitude decay in the presence of general types of weak, nonlinear damping.
The status of classical stability in higher-derivative systems is still subject to discussions. In this note, we argue that, contrary to general belief, many higher-derivative systems are classically stable. The main tool to see this property are Nekhoroshevs estimates relying on the action-angle formulation of classical mechanics. The latter formulation can be reached provided the Hamiltonian is separable, which is the case for higher-derivative harmonic oscillators. The Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillators appear to be the only type of higher-derivative harmonic oscillator with stable classical dynamics. A wide class of interaction potentials can even be added that preserve classical stability. Adiabatic invariants are built in the case of a Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillator slowly changing in time; it is shown indeed that the dynamical stability is not jeopardised by the time-dependent perturbation.