Related papers: Student difficulties with the probability distribu…
Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural…
The dynamics of a particle propagating in free space is described by its position and momentum, where quantum mechanics prohibits the simultaneous identification of two non-commutative physical quantities. Recently, a lower bound on the…
We investigate learning difficulties among second-year students on electromagnetism courses when they apply Amp\`ere-Maxwell's law. Using phenomenography, we analysed written answers from 65 undergraduate physics students to four questions…
We discuss student difficulties in distinguishing between the physical space and Hilbert space and difficulties related to the Time-independent Schroedinger equation and measurements in quantum mechanics. These difficulties were identified…
The purpose of this brief note is that of discussing the meaning of the uncertainty relations involving energy and time in quantum mechanics by means of a reading of the classical works on the subject. This was written for undergraduate…
This study presents a review of the current state of research on teaching quantum mechanics in secondary and lower undergraduate education. A conceptual approach to quantum mechanics is being implemented in more and more introductory…
Interpretations of key concepts, such as uncertainty relations, kinetic energy, value of an observable, probability distributions, the projection or collapse of a wave function postulate, and discrete versus continuous values, that appear…
We report on a multi-year, multi-institution study to investigate student reasoning about energy in the context of quantum tunnelling. We use ungraded surveys, graded examination questions, individual clinical interviews, and…
Within quantum mechanics it is possible to assign a probability to the chance that a measurement has been made at a specific time t. However, the interpretation of such a probability is far from clear. We argue that a recent measuring…
We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…
The Physics Education Group at the University of Washington is examining the extent to which students are able to use graphs of potential energy vs. position to infer kinematic and dynamic quantities for a system. The findings indicate that…
The paper addresses the debate about the empirical status of particles versus wave functions in Bohmian quantum mechanics. It thereby clarifies questions and misconceptions about the role of the particles in the measurement process, the…
We investigate the difficulties that undergraduate students in quantum mechanics courses have in transferring learning from previous courses or within the same course from one context to another by administering written tests and conducting…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
Many of the conceptual problems students have in understanding quantum mechanics arise from the way probabilities are introduced in standard (textbook) quantum theory through the use of measurements. Introducing consistent microscopic…
A distribution of electromagnetic fields presents a statistical assembly of a particular type, which is at scale h a quantum statistical assembly itself and has also been instrumental to concretisation of the basic probability assumption of…
Quantum mechanics is challenging even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Dirac notation is a convenient notation used extensively in quantum mechanics. We have been investigating the difficulties that the advanced…
A question of the time the system spends in the specified state, when the final state of the system is given, is raised. The model of weak measurements is used to obtain the expression for the time. The conditions for determination of such…
The idea that wave-function collapse is a physical process stems from a misunderstanding of probability and the role it plays in quantum mechanics.
A quantum mechanics representation based on position ($\vec{r}$), linear momentum($\vec{p}$) and energy($E$) eigenvalues is presented here. A set of equations, explicitly independent on wave function, was derived relating these observables.…