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In physics, the Rayleigh dissipation function, named after Lord Rayleigh, is a function used to handle the effects of velocity-proportional frictional forces in Lagrangian mechanics. It was first introduced by him in 1873. If the frictional force on a particle with velocity can be written as , where is a diagonal matrix, then the Rayleigh dissipation function can be defined for a system of particles as

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