Related papers: Student difficulties with representations of quant…
Dirac operators on curved space-times are introduced with the help of a new point-view that observers have to be included in the formulation of natural laws. The class of Dirac operators are Lorentz invariant in the sense that the…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
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,…
We present a software package DiracQ, for use in quantum many-body Physics. It is designed for helping with typical algebraic manipulations that arise in quantum Condensed Matter Physics and Nuclear Physics problems, and also in some…
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…
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…
Quantum mechanics is a challenging subject, even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Here, we discuss the development and evaluation of research-based concept tests for peer instruction as a formative assessment tool in…
Quantum simulators hold promise for solving many intractable problems. However, a major challenge in quantum simulation, and quantum computation in general, is to solve problems with limited physical hardware. Currently, this challenge is…
Compared with introductory physics, relatively little is known about the development of expertise in advanced physics courses, especially in the case of quantum mechanics. Here, we describe a framework for understanding the patterns of…
Quantum Information Science (QIS) is a vast, diverse, and abstract field. In consequence, learners face many challenges. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education research has found that visualizations are valuable…
Symbolic calculators like Mathematica are becoming more commonplace among upper level physics students. The presence of such a powerful calculator can couple strongly to the type of mathematical reasoning students employ. It does not merely…
Courses on undergraduate quantum mechanics usually focus on solutions of the Schr\"odinger equation for several simple one-dimensional examples. When the notion of a Hilbert space is introduced only academic examples are used, such as the…
We investigate the feasibility of performing quantum non-demolition (QND) measurements in relativistic quantum systems, using the one-dimensional Dirac oscillator as a specific example. We derive general expressions for its QND observables…
As experiments continue to push the quantum-classical boundary using increasingly complex dynamical systems, the interpretation of experimental data becomes more and more challenging: when the observations are noisy, indirect, and limited,…
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…
Simulating quantum mechanics is known to be a difficult computational problem, especially when dealing with large systems. However, this difficulty may be overcome by using some controllable quantum system to study another less controllable…
We discuss an investigation of student difficulties with the corrections to the energy spectrum of the hydrogen atom for the intermediate field Zeeman effect using the degenerate perturbation theory. The investigation was carried out in…
We investigated the common difficulties that students have with concepts related to rotational and rolling motion covered in the introductory physics courses. We compared the performance of calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics…
Students of quantum mechanics encounter discrete quantum numbers in a somewhat incoherent and bewildering number of ways. For each physical system studied, quantum numbers seem to be introduced in its own specific way, some enumerating from…
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,…