The work considers the damped Pinney equation, defined as the model arising when a linear in velocity damping term is included in the Pinney equation. In the general case the resulting equation does not admit Lie point symmetries or is reducible to a simpler form by any obvious coordinate transformation. In this context the method of Kuzmak-Luke is applied to derive a perturbation solution, for weak damping and slow time-dependence of the frequency function. The perturbative and numerical solutions are shown to be in good agreement. The results are applied to examine the time-evolution of Gaussian shaped wave-functions in the Kostin formulation of dissipative quantum mechanics.
We study linear time dispersive and dissipative systems. Very often such systems are not conservative and the standard spectral theory can not be applied. We develop a mathematically consistent framework allowing (i) to constructively determine if a given time dispersive system can be extended to a conservative one; (ii) to construct that very conservative system -- which we show is essentially unique. We illustrate the method by applying it to the spectral analysis of time dispersive dielectrics and the damped oscillator with retarded friction. In particular, we obtain a conservative extensio…
