You might come across situations where you need to transform functions that contain both sines and cosines into harmonic oscillators. Then you will need to use this formula:
Formula
Note! It’s often useful to draw the unit circle to be sure that the value you have found for is in the correct quadrant.
When you are solving equations in the form
it’s a good idea to rewrite the left-hand side to fit the form .
Example 1
Rewrite the expression into a harmonic oscillator with sine as the base function:
To rewrite the equation, you have to find the amplitude and the phase first. The amplitude is
When you’re finding the phase, you need to take the signs of (-axis) and (-axis) into account. As and , you can see that is in the fourth quadrant. That means you find the phase like this:
As , is the value for you’re looking for. That makes the equation look like this on the form of a harmonic oscillator:
Example 2
Solve the equation
First, you find :
Then you find :
You get that . As and , has to be in the first quadrant, and because , you get . That gives you
This equation has the solutions
That gives you these two solutions:
Example 3
Rewrite the expression as a harmonic oscillator with the cosine as the base function:
Note! When you want to make a cosine function, you need to subtract from the value you find for with the function. You get .
First, you find the amplitude :
When you’re finding the phase, you need to take the sign of (-axis) and (-axis) into account. As and , you are in the first quadrant, and you can find the phase like this:
Because , is the value for you need to subtract from. You get
That means the harmonic oscillator is
Example 4
Solve the equation
First, you find and to let you use the formula for the harmonic oscillator:
you can use
You get
This base equation has the solutions
Solving these equations gives you
These are the solutions to the equation, as there are no restrictions on .