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Quantum information science and technology is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field drawing researchers from science and engineering fields. Traditional instruction in quantum mechanics is insufficient to prepare students for research…
Project-based assessment, in the form of take-home exams, was trialed in an honours/masters level electromagnetic theory course. This assessment formed an integral part of the learning experience of the students, and students felt that this…
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…
Quantum computing, leveraging quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement, is emerging as a transformative force in computing technology, promising unparalleled computational speed and efficiency crucial for engineering…
Physical processes in the quantum regime possess non-classical properties of quantum mechanics. However, methods for quantitatively identifying such processes are still lacking. Accordingly, in this study, we develop a framework for…
This paper traces an intellectual journey or \textit{Way} (in the sense of a Tao) that starts with some unfinished work of Gian-Carlo Rota on making a logic of equivalence relations or partitions. Rota understood the category-theoretic…
Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
Solving exercise problems by yourself is a vital part of developing a mechanical understanding. Yet, most mechanics lectures have more than 200 participants, so the workload for manually creating and correcting assignments limits the number…
In this paper we present a generating function approach to two counting problems in elementary quantum mechanics. The first is to find the total ways of distributing identical particles among different states. The second is to find the…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we…
Deformation quantization (sometimes called phase-space quantization) is a formulation of quantum mechanics that is not usually taught to undergraduates. It is formally quite similar to classical mechanics: ordinary functions on phase space…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
We investigate student comfort with the material in an upper-division spins-first quantum mechanics course. Pre-lecture surveys probing students' comfort were administered weekly, in which students assigned themselves a "discomfort level"…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
Quantum machine learning witnesses an increasing amount of quantum algorithms for data-driven decision making, a problem with potential applications ranging from automated image recognition to medical diagnosis. Many of those algorithms are…
Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…
Parameterized complexity theory was developed in the 1990s to enrich the complexity-theoretic analysis of problems that depend on a range of parameters. In this paper we establish a quantum equivalent of classical parameterized complexity…
We show that, in spite of a rather common opinion, quantum mechanics can be represented as an approximation of classical statistical mechanics. The approximation under consideration is based on the ordinary Taylor expansion of physical…