the mass tends to overshoot its starting position, and then return, overshooting again. With each overshoot, some energy in the system is dissipated, and the oscillations die towards zero. This case is called underdamped. Between the overdamped and underdamped cases, there exists a certain level of damping at which the system will just fail to overshoot and will not make a single oscillation. This case is called critical damping. The key difference between critical damping and overdamping is that, in critical damping, the system returns to equilibrium in the minimum amount of time. Damped sine wave A damped sine wave or damped sinusoid is a sinusoidal function whose amplitude approaches zero as time increases. It corresponds to the underdamped case of damped second-order systems, or underdamped second-order differential equations. Damped sine waves are commonly seen in science and engineering, wherever a harmonic oscillator is losing energy faster than it is being supplied. A true sine wave starting at time = 0 begins at the origin (amplitude = 0). A cosine wave begins at its maximum value due to its phase difference from the sine wave. A given sinusoidal waveform may be of intermediate phase, having both sine and cosine components. The term "damped sine wave" describes all such damped waveforms, whatever their initial phase. The most common form of damping, which is usually assumed, is the form found in linear systems. This form is exponential damping, in which the outer envelope of the successive peaks is an exponential decay curve. That is, when you connect the maximum point of each successive curve, the result resembles an exponential decay function. The general equation for an exponentially damped sinusoid may be represented as: where: is the instantaneous amplitude at time ; is the initial amplitude of the envelope; is the decay rate, in the reciprocal of the time units of the independent variable ; is the phase angle at ; is the angular frequency. Other important parameters include: Frequency: , the number of cycles per time unit. It is expressed in inverse time units , or hertz. Time constant: , the time for the amplitude to decrease by the factor of e. Half-life is the time it takes for the exponential amplitude envelope to decrease by a factor of 2. It is equal to which is approximately . Damping ratio: is a non-dimensional characterization of the decay rate relative to the frequency,