Related papers: Student difficulties with determining expectation …
Given two or more non-commuting observables, it is generally not possible to simultaneously assign precise values to each. This quantum mechanical uncertainty principle is widely understood to be encapsulated by some form of uncertainty…
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,…
Significant attention in the PER community has been paid to student cognition and reasoning processes in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Until recently, however, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging…
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…
We are investigating cognitive issues in learning quantum mechanics in order to develop effective teaching and learning tools. The analysis of cognitive issues is particularly important for bridging the gap between the quantitative and…
Doubts are raised concerning the usual interpretation of the alleged failure, by quantum mechanics, of the distributive law of classical logic. The difficulty raised by incompatible sets of observables is overcome within an epistemic…
We provide a reinterpretation of the quantum vacuum ambiguities that one encounters when studying particle creation phenomena due to an external and time-dependent agent. We propose a measurement-motivated understanding: Each way of…
Experimental characterizations of a quantum system involve the measurement of expectation values of observables for a preparable state |psi> of the quantum system. Such expectation values can be measured by repeatedly preparing |psi> and…
We analyse a proposition which considers quantum theory as a mere tool for calculating probabilities for sequences of outcomes of observations made by an Observer, who him/herself remains outside the scope of the theory. Predictions are…
In the rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field of quantum information science and technology, a major obstacle is the need to understand advanced mathematics to solve complex problems. Current findings in educational research suggest that…
Introductory undergraduate courses in classical physics stress a perspective that can be characterized as realist; from this perspective, all physical properties of a classical system can be simultaneously specified and thus determined at…
A goal of most interpretations of quantum mechanics is to avoid the apparent intrusion of the observer into the measurement process. Such intrusion is usually seen to arise because observation somehow selects a single actuality from among…
A suitable unified statistical formulation of quantum and classical mechanics in a *-algebraic setting leads us to conclude that information itself is noncommutative in quantum mechanics. Specifically we refer here to an observer's…
Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…
We provide a method for estimating the expectation value of an operator that can utilize prior knowledge to accelerate the learning process on a quantum computer. Specifically, suppose we have an operator that can be expressed as a concise…
Probabilistic description of results of measurements and its consequences for understanding quantum mechanics are discussed. It is shown that the basic mathematical structure of quantum mechanics like the probability amplitudes, Born rule,…
Evaluating the expectation of a quantum circuit is a classically difficult problem known as the quantum mean value problem (QMV). It is used to optimize the quantum approximate optimization algorithm and other variational quantum…
Physical quantities and physical dimensions are among the first concepts encountered by students in their undergraduate career. In this pedagogical review, I will start from these concepts and, using the powerful tool of dimensional…
Expectation value estimation is ubiquitous in quantum algorithms. The expectation value of a Hamiltonian, which is essential in various practical applications, is often estimated by measuring a large number of Pauli strings on quantum…
The major conceptual difficulties of quantum mechanics are analyzed. They are: the notion "wave-particle", the probabilistic interpretation of the Schroedinger wave \psi-function and hence the probability amplitude and its phase, long-range…