breaking the symmetry of a circular system of coupled harmonic oscillators打破了对称耦合谐振子的循环系统.pdfVIP

IJMMS 29:11 (2002) 665–674 PII. S0161171202006014 © Hindawi Publishing Corp. BREAKING THE SYMMETRY OF A CIRCULAR SYSTEM OF COUPLED HARMONIC OSCILLATORS J. N. BOYD, R. G. HUDEPOHL, and P. N. RAYCHOWDHURY Received 23 October 2000 First we compute the natural frequencies of vibration of four identical particles cou- pled by ideal, massless harmonic springs. The four particles are constrained to move on a fixed circle. The initial computations are simplified by a transformation to sym- metry coordinates. Then the symmetry of the vibrating system is broken by changing the mass of a single particle by a very small amount. We observe the effect of apply- ing the symmetry transformation to the now slightly nonsymmetric system. We compute the new frequencies and compare them with the frequencies of the original symmet- ric system of oscillators. Results of similar calculations for 2, 3, 5, and 6 particles are given. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 20C35. 1. Introduction. We have found the application of the representation theory of fi- nite groups to the study of symmetrically coupled harmonic oscillators to be a fertile source of problems [11, 12]. We began by constructing unitary transformations from the irreducible matrix representations of the symmetry groups of the systems of oscil- lators. We then computed the natural frequencies of vibration for several complicated systems of oscillators after simplifying their equations of motion by means of the appropriate unitary transformations of their coordinates and velocities [1, 2, 3, 10]. We have also applied these transformations to the circuit equations for coupled L-C oscillators [4, 6]. In addition, we have looked at wave propagation in a two-dimension