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Motivation

In this section, we would like to apply what we have learned in the previous sections to address the question of what happens when we take an oscillator and push, or drive, it with a periodic force. This is somewhat akin to pushing a child on a swing, where the swing by itself is an oscillatory system with a certain natural frequency tex2html_wrap_inline1270 , and we can drive the system by pushing with whatever frequency tex2html_wrap_inline1154 we desire. An interesting questions about this system is what driving frequency will result in the largest response? As you may suspect, the answer is to drive at a frequency which nearly matches the natural frequency of the system, tex2html_wrap_inline1406 . But, as we shall see, the answer isn't quite that simple.



Tomas Arias
Thu Sep 13 15:07:04 EDT 2001