A New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching about Molecular Excitations and Synchrotron Radiation
Abstract
Light and spectroscopy are among the most important and frequently taught topics in introductory, college-level, general education astronomy courses. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of observational data studied by astronomers arrives at Earth in the form of light. While there are many processes by which matter can emit and absorb light, Astro 101 courses typically limit their instruction to the Bohr model of the atom and electron energy level transitions. In this paper, we report on the development of a new Lecture-Tutorial to help students learn about other processes that are responsible for the emission and absorption of light, namely molecular rotations, molecular vibrations, and the acceleration of charged particles by magnetic fields.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.01726,
title = {A New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching about Molecular Excitations and Synchrotron Radiation},
author = {Colin S. Wallace and Edward E. Prather and Seth D. Hornstein and Wayne M. Schlingman and Timothy G. Chambers and Jack O. Burns},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.01726},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
13 pages, 7 figures Accepted for publication in The Physics Teacher