Waves & Oscillations: Course Outline PHY 2101

Simple and Damped Harmonic Oscillation: Mass-Spring System, Simple Harmonic Oscillator Equation, Complex Number Notation, LC Circuit, Simple Pendulum, Quality Factor, LCR Circuit.

Forced Damped Harmonic Oscillation: Steady-State Behavior, Driven LCR Circuit, Transient Oscillator Response, Resonance

Coupled Oscillations: Two Spring-Coupled Masses, Two Coupled LC Circuits, Three Spring Coupled Masses, Normal Modes, Atomic and Lattice Vibrations

Transverse Waves: Transverse Standing Waves, Normal Modes, General Time Evolution of a Uniform String, Phase velocity, Group Velocity

Longitudinal Waves: Spring Coupled Masses, Sound Waves in an Elastic Solid, Sound Waves in an Ideal Gas

Traveling Waves: Standing Waves in a Finite Continuous Medium, Traveling Waves in an Infinite Continuous Medium, Energy Conservation, Transmission Lines, Reflection and Transmission at Boundaries.

Wave Pulses: Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms, Bandwidth.

Multi-Dimensional Waves: Plane Waves, Three-Dimensional Wave Equation, Electromagnetic waves, Laws of Geometric Optics, Waveguides, Cylindrical Waves

Interference and Diffraction of Waves: Double-Slit Interference, Single-Slit Diffraction, Double-slit diffraction.

At the end of the course the students will be able to:

• distinguish the scalar and vectorial magnitudes.
• do the vector addition and the vector substraction operations.
• express the difference between the scalar and vector product.
• apply the scalar and vector products to the various physical system.