English

Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles

Physics Education 2025-12-16 v1 Applied Physics Classical Physics

Abstract

As anyone who has blown across the mouth of a beer bottle knows, beer bottles have a well-defined fundamental frequency. This paper shows how a beer bottle's acoustical resonance can be modeled as a one-dimensional driven-damped oscillator and includes enough detail to be useful in undergraduate laboratory experiments. While the frequency-domain Green's function of the bottle can be extracted through sequential pure-tone measurements, sufficient data to fit the model's parameters can be collected in just a few seconds when Fourier methods are used.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.12312,
  title  = {Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles},
  author = {David Kordahl and Emma Foster},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.12312},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 6 figures, Forthcoming from American Journal of Physics

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:23:26.501Z