A Vermont research team has cracked a 90-year-old puzzle, creating a quantum version of the damped harmonic oscillator. By reformulating Lamb’s classical model, they showed how atomic vibrations can ...

When a guitar string is plucked or a playground swing is set in motion, the movement gradually fades away. Physicists call these “damped harmonic oscillators,” and Newton’s laws do a fine job of ...

A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call "damped harmonic ...