Related papers: Cycloid Experiment for freshmen physics labs
In this paper we prove that any convex body of the d-dimensional Euclidean space (d>1) possesses at least one shortest generalized billiard trajectory moreover, any of its shortest generalized billiard trajectories is of period at most d+1.…
The design of a serious game is presented that served as an instrument to motivate and aid to Physics education using active and ludic learning, specifically the topic of free fall of objects, with diverse educational purposes, first to…
Polygonal billiards exhibit a rich and complex dynamical behavior. In recent years polygonal billiards have attracted great attention due to their application in the understanding of anomalous transport, but also at the fundamental level,…
Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have…
Friction is a complex phenomenon that is of paramount importance in everyday life. We present an easy-to-build and inexpensive experiment illustrating Coulomb's law of kinetic friction. The so-called friction, or Timoshenko, oscillator…
Cycloids are particular Petri nets for modelling processes of actions or events. They belong to the fundaments of Petri's general systems theory and have very different interpretations, ranging from Einstein's relativity theory and…
It can be a challenge to come up with simple demonstrations of circular motion and conservation of energy. One such demonstration consists of a large exercise ball, off of which a small solid or hollow ball is rolled. The small balls are…
Semiconductor billiards are often considered as ideal systems for studying dynamical chaos in the quantum mechanical limit. In the traditional picture, once the electron's mean free path, as determined by the mobility, becomes larger than…
We call a system bouncing ball billiard if it consists of a particle that is subjected to a constant vertical force and bounces inelastically on a one-dimendional vibrating periodically corrugated floor. Here we choose circular scatterers…
A self-pulsing effect termed quantum echoes has been observed in experiments with an open superconducting and a normal conducting microwave billiard whose geometry provides soft chaos, i.e. a mixed phase space portrait with a large stable…
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…
A bicycle wheel that was initially spinning freely was placed in contact with a rough surface and a digital film was made of its motion. Using Tracker software for video analysis, we obtained the velocity vectors for several points on the…
We study the collision between the cue and the ball in the game of billiards. After studying the collision process in detail, we write the (rotational) velocities of the ball and the cue after the collision. We also find the squirt angle of…
We examine the dynamics of cylinders that are grooved to form N teeth for rolling motion down an inclined plane. The grooved cylinders are experimentally found to reach a terminal velocity. This result can be explained by the inclusion of…
We introduce a class of billiards with chaotic unidirectional flows (or non-chaotic unidirectional flows with "vortices") which go around a chaotic or non-chaotic "core", where orbits can change their orientation. Moreover, the…
The renowned Fagnano problem asks for the inscribed triangle of minimal perimeter within a given reference triangle. Equivalently, it seeks a billiard trajectory inside the triangle that closes after three reflections. In this note, we…
Games are useful tools for introducing new concepts to students. This paper describes a competitive two-player game for sophomore students in a modern physics survey course or junior/senior students in an introductory quantum mechanics…
We designed a very simple asymmetric rolling spool and we studied it experimentally, in the librational regime, by using a video camera and video analysis software. Comparison of experimental results and theoretical analysis allows…
We report observations on very low density limit of one and two balls, vibrated in a box, showing a coherent behavior along a direction parallel to the vibration. This ball behavior causes a significant reduction of the phase space…
We study a system of an elastic ball moving in the non-relativistic spacetime with a nontrivial causal structure produced by a wormhole-based time machine. For such a system it is possible to formulate a simple model of the so-called…