On the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian description of the damped linear harmonic oscillator

The Fourier series method is used to solve the homogeneous equation governing the motion of the harmonic oscillator. It is shown that the general solution to the problem can be found in a surprisingly simple way for the case of the simple harmonic oscillator. It is also shown that the damped harmonic oscillator is susceptible to the analysis.

We consider the Lagrangian formulation with duplicated variables of dissipative mechanical systems. The application of Noether theorem leads to physical observable quantities which are not conserved, like energy and angular momentum, and conserved quantities like the Hamiltonian, that generate symmetry transformations and do not correspond to observables. We show that there are simple relations among the equations satisfied by these two types of quantities. In the case of the...

We investigate the connection between the linear harmonic oscillator equation and some classes of second order nonlinear ordinary differential equations of Li\'enard and generalized Li\'enard type, which physically describe important oscillator systems. By using a method inspired by quantum mechanics, and which consist on the deformation of the phase space coordinates of the harmonic oscillator, we generalize the equation of motion of the classical linear harmonic oscillator ...

In this paper we have obtained the exact eigenstates of a two dimensional damped harmonic oscillator in time dependent noncommutative space. It has been observed that for some specific choices of the damping factor and the time dependent frequency of the oscillator, there exists interesting solutions of the time dependent noncommutative parameters following from the solutions of the Ermakov-Pinney equation. Further, these solutions enable us to get exact analytic forms for th...

Using a generalized coordinate along with a proper invertible coordinate transformation, we show that the Euler-Lagrange equation used by Bagchi et al. 16 is in clear violation of the Hamilton's principle. We also show that Newton's equation of motion they have used is not in a form that satisfies the dynamics of position-dependent mass (PDM) settings.. The equivalence between Euler-Lagrange's and Newton's equations is now proved and documented through the proper invertible c...

Damped mechanical systems with various forms of damping are quantized using the path integral formalism. In particular, we obtain the path integral kernel for the linearly damped harmonic oscillator and a particle in a uniform gravitational field with linearly or quadratically damped motion. In each case, we study the evolution of Gaussian wavepackets and discuss the characteristic features that help us distinguish between different types of damping. For quadratic damping, we...

Extended phase space (EPS) formulation of quantum statistical mechanics treats the ordinary phase space coordinates on the same footing and thereby permits the definite the canonical momenta conjugate to these coordinates . The extended lagrangian and extended hamiltonian are defined in EPS by the same procedure as one does for ordinary lagrangian and hamiltonian. The combination of ordinary phase space and their conjugate momenta exhibits the evolution of particles and their...

It is shown that one can obtain canonically-defined dynamical equations for non-conservative mechanical systems by starting with a first variation functional, instead of an action functional, and finding their zeroes. The kernel of the first variation functional, as an integral functional, is a 1-form on the manifold of kinematical states, which then represents the dynamical state of the system. If the 1-form is exact then the first variation functional is associated with the...

A simple example of one particle moving in a (1+1) space-time is considered. As an example we take the harmonic oscillator. We confirm the statement that the classical Equations of Motion do not determine at all the quantization scheme. To this aim we use two inequivalent Lagrange functions, yielding Euler-Lagrange Equations, having the same set of solutions. We present in detail the calculations of both cases to emphasize the differences occuring between them.

The harmonic oscillator is one of the most studied systems in Physics with a myriad of applications. One of the first problems solved in a Quantum Mechanics course is calculating the energy spectrum of the simple harmonic oscillator with analytic and algebraic approaches. In the algebraic solution, creation and annihilation operators are introduced to factorize the Hamiltonian. This work presents an algebraic solution for the simple harmonic oscillator in the context of Class...