Time dependent Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillator and its decomposition

Abstract: The Pais-Uhlenbeck(PU) oscillator is the simplest model with higher time derivatives. Its properties were studied for a long time. In this paper, we extend the 4th order free PU oscillator to a more non-trivial case, dubbed the 4th order time dependent PU oscillator, which has time dependent frequencies. We show that this model cannot be decomposed into two harmonic oscillators in contrast to the original PU oscillator. An interaction is added by the coordinate transformation of Smilga.