11

SUPERPOSITION
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Fundamental Concepts in this Lecture
1. Waves in the same medium add together, we call this superposition
and describe it with the idea of interference
2. Superposition of waves with different frequencies (beats)
3. Refected waves interfering with the original waves can form standing
waves for certain frequencies
4. Interference from multiple sources
5. Phase difference tells us how in sync two waves are
Waves that move
Waves are a movement of energy throughout a medium. It is not a surprise
to fnd that waves move. Below we fnd an animation of a traveling pulse on a
string. Since the string is our medium, the red string particles actually go up
and down.
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For a sinusoidal wave, we have to remember that the entire wave moves. In this
animation, we have a green string, and we have marked a spot on the string.
Notice that the red spot only goes up and down.
It does not move along with the wave. This is true of both light waves and sound
waves (except that in sound waves the air particles move back and forth).
Superposition - Wave Adding
Now, suppose we have more than one wave on a string, or more than one in-
strument making sound waves in the same piece of air. How would these waves
mix?
The animation goes by fast, but lets see if we can fgure out what is going on.
We have two waves, each pulses. The pulses are traveling on the same string.
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The next set of graphs provides animations of the last fgure showing each
piece traveling.
And the next fgure is an animation of all three, but with the original waves and
sum one above the other so you can see them all at once.

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Lets see how we got the fnal result. We start by picking a point on each wave,
say, the point x = -2. From the frst graph, we see we have a value of y = 2 at x
= -2. It is marked on the next fgure with a little bar which shows the value of
the height of the wave at that point.
We can also see that the second wave (green curve) has a value of y = -0.14 at
x = -2. This is shown on the second graph with the small green bar showing the
height of the green curve at x = -2. If we add these two wave heights, we get
2 0.14 = 1.86. We can see that this is just the height of the frst waves ampli-
tude (red) added to the amplitude of the second wave (green) for the point x =
-2. We could do the same for each x location. For x = -1, we have y = 1 for the
frst wave, and y = -1 for the second wave, yielding y = 1 1 = 0 for the result in
the third graph. In the fgure, there is also a result shown for x = 0. We can see
that the waves add point for point along the x-axis. This point for point wave
adding is called superposition.
This is really not too hard to see for a set of pulse waves. But what would this
look like for a sinusoidal wave? Here is an example. If you are able to see the
animation, you can focus on the red and green waves separately. Can you see
them moving by? Then notice that this makes a resultant wave whose ampli-
tude changes. Sometimes it is large and sometimes it is small.



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How about when the waves we add go in the same direction?
We can pause to recall what phase means. In this diagram, the red and green
waves are perfectly in phase, so much so that we can only see one curve. But
the result of adding these waves, the purple curve, is also in phase with the
other two. The amplitude is now the sum of the amplitudes of the red and green
waves. So, the amplitudes are not the same. But the waves all rise and fall at
exactly the same times. This is really what it means to be in phase. Suppose the
red and green waves are not in phase. Then what?
From the above fgure, you can see that the red and green waves are no longer
rising and falling together. The red wave is shifted down from the green curve.
They still add to form a resultant purple wave, but that wave has a smaller
amplitude, because when we add point by point, the peaks of the red and the
green waves no longer line up. The maximum heights are not at the same place
to add. Can we add more than two waves? Of course! Think of all the wave
generating devices (instruments) in a symphony orchestra! But lets try just
three for now.
So far, we get a new wave that looks a lot like the waves we are adding. But no-
tice we have only changed the phase and amplitude of our waves so far. What
happens if we add waves of different frequencies?
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Beats: Interference in Time
Until now we only superposed waves that had the same frequency. But what
happens if we add waves with different frequencies? Here are two such waves.
The picture is already pretty messy, so lets plot the new wave in another graph.
If we make the frequencies even more different we get this result:
If you have a version of this document that can show the animations, here is a
portion of the last graph that is animated:




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What would this sound like? The amplitude rises and falls as the wave passes
us. Since amplitude is related to how loud the sound seems to our ears, this
combined wave just gets louder and softer. This change in loudness is called
a beat. When two strings, two clarinets, or violins, etc. are slightly out of tune
(play different frequencies), the sound will seem to have a periodic change in
loudness, it will beat. The beats get faster with increasingly different frequen-
cies. Thus, a quick beats mean you are more out of tune. Slow beats mean you
are getting close to the same frequency. When the beats quit altogether, you
are in tune! But be careful, at some point the beats go so fast that our ears can-
not hear them. They are still there, but our ears cant pick them out. When this
happens, you are really not in tune! This is a good thing. If it were not true, we
would hear beats when a chord is played. As it is, the beats are quicker than our
ability to hear when we play different notes. This is useful for tuning, but does
not hurt when we play (isnt this world designed well?).
We can predict how fast the beats will go. The beat frequency (the frequency
with which we hear the loud pulses at a given location) is given by
For example, if we tune two instruments, one to 100Hz and one to 101Hz, we
would have a beat frequency of 1Hz.
Refection of waves
Can a wave bounce off of a boundary? Yes, we know from our look at light that
it can. If you live near the ocean, you might have seen waves bounce back from
a breakwater. If you have thrown rocks in a pond, you may have seen the waves
bounce back from a reed or a rock that was in the pond. We have already called
this bouncing of waves refection.
You might guess that calculating the shape of waves as they refect is math-
ematically intense. You would be right. We would like to avoid this if we can.
First, you looked at two wave pulses coming together from opposite directions.
One is upside down or inverted. If you are using the online version of this text,
then click the animation.
The animation should give a series of pulses that interfere much like these one
second snapshots that show the pulses coming together. The individual puls-
es are red and green, and the superposition is purple. But mostly we see the
purple combined wave, except where the pulses are right on top of each other.
2 1
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Now lets consider just how a wave looks as it approaches the end of a medium
(like a rope) that is tied down.
Or the 1 second snapshots:




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C H A P T E R 11 SUPERPOSITION 111
Lets look at both together. Notice that the top wave which refects from a
boundary is just like the left half of the two waves interfering!
Here are the 1 second snapshots:




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We can see that in each case the top graph for the wave refecting looks just like
the left hand of the mixture of two waves.
This is an easy way for us to fnd how waves should act at a boundary. Lets try
it for a jump rope tied to a ring on a post, but tied so that the ring can go up or
down. The end of the rope can be whipped upward.




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We can see this in the 1 second snapshots:
Whip upward is an apt name, because this is really how whip ends work!
We have done simple pulses, but of course we could do other shapes as well.
Lets go back to our sinusoidal waves.



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Notice that in our animation the purple combined wave had amplitude, and
wavelengths, but notice that the wave does not seem to move! It stands still
even though it is made from two traveling waves. Yes, spots go up and down,
but they seem to stay in the same horizontal place. In our easy way to fnd what
would happen to a sinusoidal wave on a tied string, we again compare to the
two waves interfering. We see the same shape!
This gives us an idea. Suppose we look at a pulse going toward a fxed or tied
down end of a rope. It will refect back. We can view this as a new wave that will
interfere with the incoming wave. For pulses, this only lasts for a moment. But
for sinusoidal waves, we can create a refected wave that will interfere with the
incoming wave. And this strange thing happens. The resultant wave will seem
to stand still. We will talk more of these standing waves in the next reading.



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Waves that arent in the same line
What about sources of sound not in a straight line? In a musical group or or-
chestra, not everyone sits in a straight line. So when we add waves we wont see
the easy charts that we have seen so far. Lets set up two speakers next to each
other and turn them on with a sound generator that creates just one frequency.
They make big spheres of sound around them that have wave crests something
like what we see in the fgure below.
Just like with our linear waves, we see that wave crests add to make a larger
combined wave crest. The opposite of the wave crest is the low spot. We call it a
trough (think of a water trough for horses in old western movies).
Wave troughs combine to form a larger wave trough; and where wave troughs
and crests combine, we get zero. Zero motion is the same as no sound. This is
a dead spot in your home theater or concert hall--something we want to avoid!
We call dead spots destructive interference and we call the loudest spots con-
structive interference.
Lets see how to create a dead spot. If we take two waves that are half a wave-
length out of phase and add them we get a zero.
Thus, anywhere in our area around the two speakers where the distance from
one speaker is more than the distance from the other speaker plus half a wave-
length will be a dead spot.


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Really, there will be a dead spot when we can divide the distance to a spot by
the wavelength and we have a remainder of zero for one wave (say, the red
wave), and a remainder of half a wavelength for the other.

Dead Spot
Half a wavelength
farther from the green
wave center
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