Related papers: Faculty survey on upper-division thermal physics c…
Thermodynamics is a macroscopic physical theory whose two very general laws are independent of any underlying dynamical laws and structures. Nevertheless, its generality enables us to understand a broad spectrum of phenomena in physics,…
Thermal expansion in materials can be accurately modeled with careful anharmonic phonon calculations within density functional theory. However, because of interest in controlling thermal expansion and the time consumed evaluating thermal…
Science communication skills are considered essential learning objectives for undergraduate physics students. However, high enrollment and limited class resources present significant barriers to providing students ample opportunities to…
The ability to develop, use, and refine models of experimental systems is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. However, no assessments of students' model-based reasoning exist for upper-division…
The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner in 1994 to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which…
The course description provided by instructors is an important piece of information as it defines what is expected from the instructor and what he/she is going to deliver during a particular course. One of the key components of a course…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
We investigated the difficulties that physics students in upper-level undergraduate quantum mechanics and graduate students after quantum and statistical mechanics core courses have with the Fermi energy, the Fermi-Dirac distribution and…
In this work, we suggest a parameterized statistical model (the gamma distribution) for the frequency of word occurrences in long strings of English text and use this model to build a corresponding thermodynamic picture by constructing the…
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…
Web-based systems for assessment or homework are commonly used in many different domains. Several studies show that these systems can have positive effects on learning outcomes. Many research efforts also have made these systems quite…
Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…
The Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey (QMCS) is a 12-question survey of students' conceptual understanding of quantum mechanics. It is intended to be used to measure the relative effectiveness of different instructional methods in modern…
We introduce a Python package that provides simply and unified access to a collection of datasets from fundamental physics research - including particle physics, astroparticle physics, and hadron- and nuclear physics - for supervised…
Thermal analysis is increasingly critical in modern integrated circuits, where non-uniform power dissipation and high transistor densities can cause rapid temperature spikes and reliability concerns. Traditional methods, such as FEM-based…
Understanding the thermodynamic properties of many-body quantum systems and their emergence from microscopic laws is a topic of great significance due to its profound fundamental implications and extensive practical applications. Recent…
During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy…
Learning is a complex cognitive process that depends not only on an individual capability of knowledge absorption but it can be also influenced by various group interactions and by the structure of an academic curriculum. We have applied…
The demand for sophisticated tools and approaches in heat management and control has triggered fast development of emerging fields including conductive thermal metamaterials, nanophononics, far-field and near-field radiative thermal…
We investigate the fundamental limitations imposed by thermodynamics for creating correlations. Considering a collection of initially uncorrelated thermal quantum systems, we ask how much classical and quantum correlations can be obtained…