A single particle is allowed to bounce in a box with two fixed particles. A velocity measurement is made every tenth of a second and a histogram is constructed from these measurements.
Explain the general appearance of the velocity histogram.
What would the histogram of position measurements look like? Hint: Compare this result to the simple harmonic oscillator velocity histogram.
Since the energy of the particle is constant, the speed, but not the direction, or the particle is constant. Project randomly oriented vectors of constant length onto the x axis to obtain the histogram.
A single particle with constant energy and random direction is isomorphic with a simple harmonic oscillator. The histograms will be identical.
This script makes extensive use of inter-applet communication. The moving particle is a Physlet data source that generates x, y, vx, and vy values. These values are passed to the histogram filter. This filter sorts the incoming data into the appropriate bins and then passes the resulting histogram to the DataGraph Physlets.
Jar files: DataGraph4_.jar, Filters4_.jar, Molecular4_.jar, STools4.jar
Images: none
Script by Wolfgang Christian
Questions by Wolfgang Christian.
Java applets by Wolfgang Christian.