Speaker
Description
Start with the textbook underdamped circuit consisting of a capacitor, inductor, and resistor wired in series. The initial conditions are the capacitor is charged and the current is zero. Use an oscilloscope probe to measure the oscillating voltage across the capacitor as a function of time. If we now connect a diode in series with the input to that probe, we have a half rectifier but the resulting voltage does not vary smoothly. We can get a much smoother signal (over a certain range of time) if we instead connect the diode in parallel with the probe. (The diode is initially reverse biased relative to the capacitor to avoid shorting it out.) A comparison is made between theory and experiment that exhibits good agreement, provided an air-core coil is used.
