Chapter12FourierSeries.PDFVIP

Chapter 12 Fourier Series 12.1 Motivation Many problems in physics involve vibrations and oscillations. Often the os- cillatory motion is simple (e.g. weights on springs, pendulums, harmonic waves etc.) and can be represented as single sine or cosine functions. How- ever, in many cases, (electromagnetism, heat conduction, quantum theory, etc.) the waveforms are not simple and, unlike sines and cosines, can be difficult to treat analytically. Fourier methods give us a set of powerful tools for representing any periodic function as a sum of sines and cosines. The Fourier series of a function, f (x), with period 2L is, ∞ 1 nπx nπx f (x) = a0 + an cos + bn sin . (12.1) 2 L L n=1 To see how this works, let us consider a sound wave. The vibration of a tuning fork produces a sound wave of a given frequency. If we plot the pressure as a function of distance, x, or time, t, it looks like a single sine wave, or a ’pure tone’ (Fig. 12.1: left). When a note is played on a flute, we get a more complex sound (Fig. 12.1: centre). The note that we get is made up from the sum of many pure tones: the fundamental and different harmonics with frequencies 2,3,4,. . . times the frequency of the fundamental (Fig. 12.1: right). This is the Fourier series. Fourier methods are used very heavily in signal and data analysis. By Fourier analysing a signal - essentially by expanding it in the form of Eq. (12.1) - we can immediately tell which harmonics are the important ones. For ex- 1 Figure 12.1: Left: a pure sine wave, sin(ωt). Centre: example waveform, f (t), f