Anharmonic oscillator: A playground to get insight into renormalization

Abstract

In the presence of interactions the frequency of a simple harmonic oscillator deviates from the noninteracting one. Various methods can be used to compute the changes to the frequency perturbatively. Some of them resemble the methods used in quantum field theory where the bare values of the parameters of the theory run when an interaction is added. In this paper, we review some of these techniques and introduce some new ones in line with quantum field theory methods. Moreover, we investigate the case of more than one oscillator to see how the frequencies of small oscillations change when non-linear terms are added to a linear system and observe an interesting beat phenomenon in degenerate coupled oscillatory systems.