Tuesday, August 7, 2018

homework and exercises - How can I derive the Hamiltonian of simple harmonic oscillator from this Lagrangian?


I'm working through Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum: Classical Mechanics and I can't seem to understand how the Hamiltonian of a simple harmonic oscillator is derived from the following Lagrangian:



L = ω2˙q2ω2q2


where ω=km.


The main problem I'm having is that while I understand the basic substitution required to transform the Lagrangian into the Hamiltonian form, I can't understand how the final form of the Hamiltonian is derived in the book:


H = ω2(p2+q2)


I made it this far:


H=p2mp22m2ω+ωq22


I don't see the intuition behind the substitutions necessary to derive the final form of this equation. How does p2mp22m2ω become ω2p2?




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