use polyfit on the vector logx to calculate loga and the coefficient of damping in matlab

main.m
logx = log(x); % assuming x is your vector of x values
logy = log(y); % assuming y is your vector of corresponding y values

p = polyfit(logx, logy, 1);
loga = p(2);
coefficient_of_damping = p(1);
197 chars
7 lines

In this code snippet, we first calculate the natural logarithms of the x and y values (assuming x and y are vectors of data points). We then use the polyfit function to fit a first-degree polynomial to the log-transformed data points. The coefficient corresponding to log(x) gives us log(a) and the coefficient of log(x) gives us the coefficient of damping.