Past exam of the physics course of the year 1 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2021 / Section B / 8 / b / Solution

Put $\delta ={\varphi }_2-{\varphi }_1$. If both coordinate amplitudes are nonzero, eliminate the common phase to obtainFor $\sin \delta \ne 0$, this is an ellipse centred at the origin. The following special cases exhaust the possible nontrivial shapes:

The degenerate zero-amplitude solution is the stationary origin. There are no general multi-loop patterns here because the two angular frequencies are equal. Another useful description is $\mathbf{r}=\mathbf{a}\cos \omega t+\mathbf{b}\sin \omega t$, the image of a circle under a linear map.