19:55 Nov 10, 2011 

I personally think that we shouldn't try to interpret too much, and that if the end translation is just translated French - well that's fine in this context. If the "ground state" or the "vibrational frequency" are equivalent to the "frequency at the bottom of the potential well", then the reader will either know that or he won't - if he does, he does not need to be told, and if he doesn't, then there may be a reason why the French author placed emphasis on one approach and not the other. Additionally, as Chris mentioned, we can't necessarily affirm that they are the same thing without sitting down and working out the details of the demonstration - which we definitely can't do over the KudoZ forums.

So I vote for a rigorously faithful translation, even if it does mean sacrificing some degree of "naturalness".

13:46 Nov 10, 2011 

I'm on slightly shaky ground here since the last time I solved the Schrödinger equation was 40 years ago. Nevertheless, most of the refs to "oscillation at the bottom of the (potential) well appear to be papers with French authors. Since what is being discussed is a light-frequency oscillator, not a classical harmonic oscillator, what they may be referring to may in fact be ground-state oscillation. If the experiment is being performed at very low temperatures, then this could be a clue. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator for further confusion