Autoresonant (nonstationary) excitation of pendulums, Plutinos, plasmas, and other nonlinear oscillators

A weakly driven pendulum cannot be strongly excited by a fixed frequency drive. The only way to strongly excite the pendulum is to use a drive whose frequency decreases with time. Feedback is often used to control the rate at which the frequency decreases. Feedback need not be employed, however; the drive frequency can simply be swept downwards. With this method, the drive strength must exceed a threshold proportional to the sweep rate raised to the 3/4 power. This threshold has been discovered only recently, and holds for a very broad class of driven nonlinear oscillators. The threshold may explain the abundance of 3:2 resonances and dearth of 2:1 resonances observed between the orbital periods of Neptune and the Plutinos (Pluto and many of the Kuiper Belt objects), and has been extensively investigated in the Diocotron system in pure-electron plasmas. (C) 2001 American Association of Physics Teachers.