Written by Glenn Stark
Written by Glenn Stark


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Written by Glenn Stark

Characteristics of waves

From ripples on a pond to deep ocean swells, sound waves, and light, all waves share some basic characteristics. Broadly speaking, a wave is a disturbance that propagates through space. Most waves move through a supporting medium, with the disturbance being a physical displacement of the medium. The time dependence of the displacement at any single point in space is often an oscillation about some equilibrium position. For example, a sound wave travels through the medium of air, and the disturbance is a small collective displacement of air molecules—individual molecules oscillate back and forth as the wave passes.

Unlike particles, which have well-defined positions and trajectories, waves are not localized in space. Rather, waves fill regions of space, and their evolutions in time are not described by simple trajectories. Nevertheless, some waves are more localized than others, and so it is useful to distinguish two broad classes. (1) A wave pulse is a relatively localized disturbance. For example, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the resulting ripples, which constitute a surface wave, extend over only a small portion of the surface at any instant of time. (2) At the opposite extreme, periodic waves can extend over great distances. In the example above, if the water surface is repeatedly disturbed at one point for a long period of time, the surface ripples eventually will blanket a large area.

A simple and useful example of a periodic wave is a harmonic wave; a snapshot of such a wave at one instant of time and a complementary picture showing the time dependence of the wave at one point in space are shown in the figure. The wavelength λ of the wave is the physical separation between successive crests. The maximum displacement of the wave, or amplitude, is denoted by A. The time between successive oscillations is called the period τ of the wave. The number of oscillations per second is the wave frequency f, which is the reciprocal of the period, 1/τ.

Harmonic waves propagate with well-defined velocities that are related to their frequency and wavelength. Fixing attention on a single point in space, the number of wave crests that pass that point per second is the wave frequency f. The distance traveled past that point by any one crest in one second—the wave velocity v—is equal to the distance between crests λ multiplied by the frequency: v = λf.

The properties of harmonic waves are illustrated in the mathematical expression for the displacement in both space and time. For a harmonic wave traveling in the x-direction, the spatial and time dependence of the displacement ϕ is


A defining characteristic of all waves is superposition, which describes the behaviour of overlapping waves. The superposition principle states that when two or more waves overlap in space, the resultant disturbance is equal to the algebraic sum of the individual disturbances. (This is sometimes violated for large disturbances; see below Nonlinear interactions.) This simple underlying behaviour leads to a number of effects that are collectively called interference phenomena.

There are two extreme limits to interference effects. In constructive interference the crests of two waves coincide, and the waves are said to be in phase with each other (see figure). Their superposition results in a reinforcement of the disturbance; the amplitude of the resulting combined wave is the sum of the individual amplitudes. Conversely, in destructive interference the crest of one wave coincides with the valley of a second wave, and they are said to be out of phase. The amplitude of the combined wave equals the difference between the amplitudes of the individual waves. In the special case where those individual amplitudes are equal, the destructive interference is complete, and the net disturbance to the medium is zero.

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