Oscillation Oscillation is the variation, typically in time, of some measure as seen, for example, in a swinging pendulum.

The term vibration is sometimes used more narrowly to mean a mechanical oscillation but sometimes is used to be synonymous with oscillation. Oscillations occur not only in physical systems but also in biological systems and in human society. Simple systems The simplest mechanical oscillating system is a mass, subject to the force of gravity, attached to a linear spring. The system is in an equilibrium state when the weight of the mass is balanced by the tension of the spring. If the system is displaced from the equilibrium, there is a net restoring force on the mass, tending to bring it back to equilibrium. However, in moving the mass back to the equilibrium position, it has acquired momentum which keeps it moving beyond that position, establishing a new restoring force, now in the opposite sense and this time due to gravity. The time taken for an oscillation to occur is often referred to as being the oscillatory period. The specific dynamics of this spring-mass system are described mathematically by the simple harmonic oscillator and the regular periodic motion is known as simple harmonic motion. In the spring-mass system, oscillations occur because, when at the static equilibrium displacement, the mass has kinetic energy which is converted into energy stored in the spring at the extremes of its path. The spring-mass system illustrates some important and universal principles of oscillation:

Existence of an equilibrium; Presence of some restoring force (or restoring principle in nonmechanical systems); Some form of "momentum" or kinetic energy that maintains motion; and Exchange in "energy" between that kinetic and potential energy due to the restoring force.

The harmonic oscillator offers a model of many more complicated types of oscillation and can be extended by the use of Fourier analysis. Damped, driven and self-induced oscillations In real-world systems, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that there is some continual and inevitable conversion of energy into the thermal energy of the environment. Thus, damped oscillations tend to decay with time unless there is some net source of energy in the system. The simplest description of this decay process can be illustrated by the harmonic oscillator.

Self inducing oscillations Some systems can be excited by energy transfer from the environment. This typically occurs where systems are embedded in some fluid flow. For example, the phenomenon of flutter in aerodynamics occurs when an arbitrarily small displacement of an aircraft wing (from its equilibrium) results in an increase in the angle of attack of the wing on the air flow and a consequential increase in lift coefficient leading to a greater displacement before, at sufficiently large displacements, the stiffness of the wing dominates to provide the restoring force that enables an oscillation. Coupled oscillations The harmonic oscillator, and the more complicated systems for which it stands as a simple model, has a single degree of freedom. More complicated systems have more degrees of freedom, for example two masses and two springs. In such cases, energy is converted between the respective inertias of each degree of freedom and the several restoring forces in the system. This leads to a coupling of the oscillations of the individual degrees of freedom. For example, two pendulum clocks mounted on a common wall will tend to synchronise. The apparent motions of the individual oscillations typically appears very complicated but a more economic, computationally simpler and conceptually deeper description is given by resolving the motion into normal modes. Continuous systems - waves As the number of degrees of freedom becomes indefinitely large, a system approaches continuity, for example, a string or the surface of a body of water. Such systems have an infinite number of normal modes and their oscillations occur in the form of waves that have the characteristic that they can propagate. Neural systems Neural oscillations occur in individual cells and cell ensembles. Depending on the frequency, brain area and behavior associated with neuronal oscillations, a diversity of functions have been suggested.

Neural oscillations The concept of neural oscillations is close to the concept of brain waves. However, the latter usually refers to EEG recordings obtained from the skull, and the former refers to more invasive recording techniques such as single-unit recordings with extracellular electrodes, intracellular recordings of neuronal potentials and recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) using electrodes directly contacting the brain. Neuronal oscillations are quite

typical for brain cells and neural ensembles. They occur at different frequency ranges, in different brain areas, and some type of oscillations have been related to particular behaviors. Visual system Neuronal oscillations became a hot topic in Neuroscience in the 1990s when the studies of the visual system of the brain by Gray, Singer and others appeared to support the neural binding hypothesis. According to this idea, synchronous oscillations in neuronal ensembles bind neurons representing different features of an object. For example, when a person looks at a tree, visual cortex neurons representing the tree trunk and those representing the branches of the same tree would oscillate in synchrony to form a single representation of the tree (for recent development see Fingelkurts An.A. and Fingelkurts Al.A., Operational architectonics of the human brain biopotential field: Towards solving the mind-brain problem. Brain and Mind. 2001. 2(3):261-296). Olfactory System In a series of elegant papers beginning in 1994, Gilles Laurent and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology showed that oscillations exist in the brain of the locust, that different odors lead to different subsets of neurons firing on different sets of oscillatory cycles (Wehr and Laurent, 1996), that the oscillations can be disrupted by GABA blocker picrotoxin (MacLeod and Laurent, 1996), that disruption of the oscillatory synchronization leads to impairment of behavioral discrimination of chemically similar odorants in bees (Stopfer et al., 1997) and to more similar responses across odors in downstream -lobe neurons (MacLeod et al., 1998). Motor system Oscillations have been also reported in the motor system. Murthy and Fetz (1992) described motor cortical oscillations in monkey cortex when the monkeys performed motor acts that required significant attention (retrieval of raisins from unseen locations). Similar oscillations were observed in motor cortex during periods of immobility by the groups of John Donoghue and Roger Lemon. Oscillating neurons have been also reported in somatosensory cortex (Mikhail Lebedev and Randall Nelson) and in premotor cortex (Mikhail Lebedev and Steven Wise). In these cortical areas, 20-40 Hz oscillations are often observed during periods of attentive immobility, and they typically disappear during movements. Large-scale oscillations Oscillations recorded from multiple cortical areas can become synchronized and form a large-scale network, whose dynamics and functional

connectivity can be studied by means of spectral analyses (Fingelkurts et al., 2003), Granger causality (Andrea Brovelli, Steven L. Bressler and their colleagues, 2004), and operational synchrony (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2001; 2005) measures. Brain-computer interface Pesaran, Andersen and their colleagues suggested that neural oscillations can be used as a control signal for brain-computer interfaces because oscillatory pattern depends on the direction of movement that the monkey prepares to execute. Recent study of Rickert and colleagues (2005) supports this suggestion. Oscillations and perception Neural oscillations may have different functional roles in different brain areas, and their functional role continues to be a matter of debate. Neural oscillations have been hypothesized to be involved in the sense of time (Buhusi and Meck, 2005) and in somatosensory perception (Ahissar and Zacksenhouse, 2001) among other functions. Neuronal mechanisms of oscillations Neuronal mechanisms of oscillations are complex. Scientists suggest that both intrinsic neuronal properties (Rodolfo Llinas and colleagues, 1991) and neural network properties are involved. Wave A wave is a disturbance that propagates through space or spacetime, often transferring energy. While a mechanical wave exists in a medium (which on deformation is capable of producing elastic restoring forces), waves of electromagnetic radiation (and probably gravitational radiation) can travel through vacuum, that is, without a medium. Waves travel and transfer energy from one point to another, often with little or no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium (i.e. little or no associated mass transport); instead there are oscillations around almost fixed positions. Characteristics

Surface waves in water

Periodic waves are characterized by crests (highs) and troughs (lows), and may usually be categorized as either longitudinal or transverse. Transverse waves are those with vibrations perpendicular to the direction of the propagation of the wave; examples include waves on a string and electromagnetic waves. Longitudinal waves are those with vibrations parallel to the direction of the propagation of the wave; examples include most sound waves. When an object bobs up and down on a ripple in a pond, it experiences an orbital trajectory because ripples are not simple transverse sinusoidal waves.

A = At deep water. B = At shallow water. The circular movement of a surface particle becomes elliptical with decreasing depth. 1 = Progression of wave 2 = Crest 3 = Trough Ripples on the surface of a pond are actually a combination of transverse and longitudinal waves; therefore, the points on the surface follow orbital paths. All waves have common behavior under a number of standard situations. All waves can experience the following:

Reflection the change of direction of waves, due to hitting a reflective surface. Refraction the change of direction of waves due to entering a new medium. Diffraction the circular spreading of waves due to entering a hole of comparable size to their wavelengths. Interference the superposition of two waves that come into contact with each other.

Dispersion the splitting up of waves by frequency. Rectilinear propagation the movement of waves in straight lines.

Polarization A wave is polarized if it can only oscillate in one direction. The polarization of a transverse wave describes the direction of oscillation, in the plane perpendicular to the direction of travel. Longitudinal waves such as sound waves do not exhibit polarization, because for these waves the direction of oscillation is along the direction of travel. A wave can be polarized by using a polarizing filter.

Examples

An ocean surface wave crashing into rocks Examples of waves include:

Ocean surface waves, which are perturbations that propagate through water. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared rays, visible light, ultraviolet rays, x-rays, and gamma rays make up electromagnetic radiation. In this case, propagation is possible without a medium, through vacuum. These electromagnetic waves travel at 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum. Sound - a mechanical wave that propagates through air, liquid or solids. Seismic waves in earthquakes, of which there are three types, called S, P, and L. Gravitational waves, which are fluctuations in the gravitational field predicted by general Relativity. These waves are nonlinear, and have yet to be observed empirically.

Inertial waves, which occur in rotating fluids and are restored by the Coriolis force.

Mathematical description

Waves can be described mathematically using a series of parameters. The amplitude of a wave (commonly notated as A, or another letter) is a measure of the maximum disturbance in the medium during one wave cycle. (the maximum distance from the highest point of the crest to the equilibrium). In the illustration to the right, this is the maximum vertical distance between the baseline and the wave. The units of the amplitude depend on the type of wave waves on a string have an amplitude expressed as a distance (meters), sound waves as pressure (pascals) and electromagnetic waves as the amplitude of the electric field (volts/meter). The amplitude may be constant (in which case the wave is a c.w. or continuous wave), or may vary with time and/or position. The form of the variation of amplitude is called the envelope of the wave. The wavelength (denoted as ) is the distance between two sequential crests (or troughs). This generally has the unit of meters; it is also commonly measured in nanometers for the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum. A wavenumber k can be associated with the wavelength by the relation

Waves can be represented by simple harmonic motion.

The period T is the time for one complete cycle for an oscillation of a wave. The frequency f (also frequently denoted as ) is how many periods per unit time (for example one second) and is measured in hertz. These are related by:

. In other words, the frequency and period of a wave are reciprocals of each other. The angular frequency represents the frequency in terms of radians per second. It is related to the frequency by

There are two velocities that are associated with waves. The first is the phase velocity, which gives the rate at which the wave propagates, is given by

. The second is the group velocity, which gives the velocity at which variations in the shape of the wave's amplitude propagate through space. This is the rate at which information can be transmitted by the wave. It is given by

The wave equation The wave equation is a differential equation that describes the evolution of a harmonic wave over time. The equation has slightly different forms depending on how the wave is transmitted, and the medium it is traveling through. Considering a one-dimensional wave that is travelling down a rope along the x-axis with velocity v and amplitude u (which generally depends on both x and t), the wave equation is

In three dimensions, this becomes

where

is the Laplacian.

The velocity v will depend on both the type of wave and the medium through which it is being transmitted. A general solution for the wave equation in one dimension was given by d'Alembert. It is

This can be viewed as two pulses travelling down the rope in opposite directions; F in the +x direction, and G in the x direction. If we substitute for x above, replacing it with directions x, y, z, we then can describe a wave propagating in three dimensions. The Schrdinger equation describes the wave-like behaviour of particles in quantum mechanics. Solutions of this equation are wave functions which can be used to describe the probability density of a particle. Quantum mechanics also describes particle properties that other waves, such as light and sound, have on the atomic scale and below. Traveling waves Waves that remain in one place are called standing waves - e.g. vibrations on a violin string. Waves that are moving are called traveling waves, also called progressive waves, and have a disturbance that varies both with time t and distance z. This can be expressed mathematically as:

where A(z,t) is the amplitude envelope of the wave, k is the wave number and is the phase. The phase velocity vp of this wave is given by

where is the wavelength of the wave. Propagation through strings The speed of a wave traveling along a string (v) is directly proportional to the square root of the tension (T) over the linear density ():

Transmission medium The medium that carries a wave is called a transmission medium. It can be classified into one or more of the following categories:

A linear medium if the amplitudes of different waves at any particular point in the medium can be added. A bounded medium if it is finite in extent, otherwise an unbounded medium. A uniform medium if its physical properties are unchanged at different locations in space. An isotropic medium if its physical properties are the same in different directions.