A laboratory experiment on coupled non-identical pendulums

In this paper, coupled pendulums with different lengths are studied. Through steel magnets, each pendulum is coupled with others, and a stepping motor is used to drive the whole system. To record the data automatically, we designed a data acquisition system with a CCD camera connected to a computer. The coupled system shows in-phase, locked-phase and anti-phase synchronizations when the driving frequency and the coupling strength are changed. With background knowledge from general physics and the simplicity of the equipment, this experiment is easy to implement and would be of interest to undergraduate students.