Noether symmetries and first integrals of damped harmonic oscillator

TL;DR

This paper classifies Noether symmetries of the damped harmonic oscillator, constructs conservation laws for various damping cases, introduces a new Lagrangian, and derives analytical solutions, revealing new insights into its symmetry structure.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of Noether symmetries for all damping cases and introduces a novel Lagrangian that yields identical symmetries and conserved quantities.

Findings

Maximum five linearly independent symmetries per damping case

Analytical solutions derived for each damping scenario

New Lagrangian form reproduces known symmetries and conserved quantities

Abstract

Noether theorem establishes an interesting connection between symmetries of the action integral and conservation laws of a dynamical system. The aim of the present work is to classify the damped harmonic oscillator problem with respect to Noether symmetries and to construct corresponding conservation laws for all over-damped, under damped and critical damped cases. For each case we obtain maximum five linearly independent group generators which provide related five conserved quantities. Remarkably, after obtaining complete set of invariant quantities we obtain analytical solutions for each case. In the current work, we also introduce a new Lagrangian for the damped harmonic oscillator. Though the form of this new Lagrangian and presented by Bateman are completely different, yet it generates same set of Noether symmetries and conserved quantities. So, this new form of Lagrangian we are presenting here may be seriously interesting for the physicists. Moreover, we also find the Lie algebras of Noether symmetries and point out some interesting aspects of results related to Noether symmetries and first integrals of damped harmonic oscillator which perhaps not reported in the earlier studies.