Beats in an Oscillator Near Resonance
Chris Gaffney, David T. Kagan · The Physics Teacher · 2002
When a hanging mass-spring system is driven with an audio speaker near its natural frequency, one observes very long lived beats. Besides being a beautiful example of beats in a mechanical system, their presence is in fact initially surprising. Combining a simple analysis with measurements from a PASCO motion sensor, a satisfactory understanding emerges.