Atoms and anharmonic oscillations
- Apply Gauss' law
We can deduce the resonance frequency of the oscillation of the proton w.r.t. the electron cloud, which yields
This resonance frequency compared with the driving frequency of visible light tells us that the system is heavily damped and the oscillation amplitude is stiffness controlled.
Damping in Atomic oscillators
Consider the Larmor's radiation formular in electrodynamics for a charge moving at
The mean energy of the electron oscillating is
Integrate the previous formular to get the time decaying coefficient of the energy.
Notice the under the illumination of visible light, the proton-electron cloud system is heavily damped with a time constant
Hence we estimate the values of
Linear system driven at multiple harmonic frequencies
Due to the linearity of the linear system, the resulting oscillation is the linear combination of the solutions in the cases of independently driven harmonic ocsillations.
Consider phase shifts
for two displacement solutions in the two forces case.
The compound motion's amplitude is given by trigonometric manipulations
The thrid term is likely to drift in time in most systems that are not exactly stable.
- We also note the resulting displacement is a high frequency term multiplied by a pow frequency term, giving rise to the beating phenomenon.
