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Coupled Oscillators

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Two spring-mass oscillators are coupled by a massless spring. You can vary the mass , the extension of the spring, and the initial displacement separately for both oscillators, and three different coupling factors can be chosen. You can display the graphs of the time functions of the displacement and the total energy of the oscillators.

Contributed by: Hans-Joachim Domke (November 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Snapshots

Details

Screenshot 1: the out-of-phase normal mode; no energy is exchanged

Screenshot 2: the exchange of energy is only complete if the oscillators have the same eigenfrequencies; in this case, the phase difference of the displacements is ; the ripple is produced by the energy of the coupling spring

Screenshot 3: this view simulates a typical experiment

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