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The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…
We describe a study on the conceptual difficulties faced by college students in understanding hydrodynamics of ideal fluids. This study was based on responses obtained in hundreds of written exams and oral interviews, which were held with…
Electrical circuits offer a unique platform to explore physical phenomena, from topology to non-Hermitian effects. Investigations of the fundamental properties of this metamaterial platform are crucial to distinguish observed/measured…
We present some ideas for synthesizing nanocircuit elements in the optical domain using plasmonic and non-plasmonic nanoparticles. Three basic circuit elements, i.e., nano-inductors, nano-capacitors, and nano-resistors, are discussed in…
Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by…
Introductory courses on electric circuits at undergraduate level are usually presented in quite abstract terms, with questions and problems quite far from practical problems. This causes the students have difficulties to apply that theory…
This paper reports on an investigation into the correlations between students' understandings of introductory astronomy concepts and the correctness and coherency of their written responses to targeted Lecture-Tutorial questions. We…
We discuss the categorization of 20 quantum mechanics problems by physics professors and undergraduate students from two honors-level quantum mechanics courses. Professors and students were asked to categorize the problems based upon…
Helping students learn why Gauss' law can or cannot be easily applied to determine the strength of the electric field at various points for a particular charge distribution, and then helping them learn to determine the shape of the Gaussian…
This is the problem of the 7-th international Experimental Physics Olympiad "The Day of the Inductance". A large inductance made by a general impedance converter is measured by the Maxwell-Wien bridge. The youngest students (S category)…
Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing rather than a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. Using the theoretical lens of epistemological framing,…
Most introductory physics textbooks ask students to ignore air resistance but include no analysis of the appropriateness of that approximation. Indeed the approximation is inappropriate in many textbook problems. This short supplementary…
An expression for the conductance of interacting electrons in the diffusive regime as a function of the ensemble averaged persistent current and the compressibility of the system is presented. This expression involves only ground-state…
Proficiency with calculating, reporting, and understanding measurement uncertainty is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a research-based assessment…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…
We developed a survey to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics concepts at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 graduate students in physics enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses…
Quantum Computing is an exciting field that draws from information theory, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics to process information in fundamentally new ways. There is an ongoing race to develop practical quantum computers…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
Since the particles such as molecules, atoms and nuclei are composite particles, it is important to recognize that physics must be invariant for the composite particles and their constituent particles, this requirement is called particle…