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arXiv2022

Modeling Quantum Enhanced Sensing on a Quantum Computer

Quantum computers allow for direct simulation of the quantum interference and entanglement used in modern interferometry experiments with applications ranging from biological sensing to gravitational wave detection. Inspired by recent developments in quantum sensing at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), here we present two quantum circuit models that demonstrate the role of quantum mechanics and entanglement in modern precision sensors. We implemented these quantum circuits on IBM quantum processors, using a single qubit to represent independent photons traveling through the LIGO interferometer and two entangled qubits to illustrate the improved sensitivity that LIGO has achieved by using non-classical states of light. The one-qubit interferometer illustrates how projection noise in the measurement of independent photons corresponds to phase sensitivity at the standard quantum limit. In the presence of technical noise on a real quantum computer, this interferometer achieves the sensitivity of 11\% above the standard quantum limit. The two-qubit interferometer demonstrates how entanglement circumvents the limits imposed by the quantum shot noise, achieving the phase sensitivity 17\% below the standard quantum limit. These experiments illustrate the role that quantum mechanics plays in setting new records for precision measurements on platforms like LIGO. The experiments are broadly accessible, remotely executable activities that are well suited for introducing undergraduate students to quantum computation, error propagation, and quantum sensing on real quantum hardware.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Summary Report of the Topical Group on Physics Education, Community Engagement Frontier (CEF4/CommF4) Snowmass 2021

An essential companion to the development and advancement of the field of Particle Physics is a strong program in physics education at all levels, that can attract entry level students across the full demographic spectrum and provide them with the education, training and skills needed to advance to successful careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and other fields. This report summarizes the work of several investigative teams that have reviewed and assessed current opportunities in physics education across K-12, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral domains, including national and international linkages. From these assessments, recommendations have been put forward aimed to innovate educationally in strategic ways to strengthen ties between the research community and teachers, between the academic community and the private sector, and through both domestic and international connections.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2025

Closeness in a physics faculty online learning community predicts impacts in self-efficacy and teaching

Community-based professional development initiatives have been shown to support physics faculty in their adoption of research-based instructional strategies. Hoping to better understand these initiatives' mechanisms of success, we analyze the results of two surveys administered to a faculty online learning community teaching a common physics curriculum designed primarily for pre-service elementary teachers. We use social network analysis to represent the faculty network and compare members' centrality, a family of measures that capture the prominence of individuals within a network, to their reported experience in the community. We use a principal component analysis of different centrality measures to show that closeness, a measure of how closely connected a person is with every other person in their network, is the most appropriate centrality measure for our network. We then compare regression models according to Bayes factors to find relationships between participants' closeness and their survey responses. We find that participants' self-efficacy, as well as their sense of improvement to their teaching and sense of benefitting from the community, are predictors of their closeness with other participants and thus their breadth and depth of participation in the community. Our results are consistent with other studies that have highlighted interactions among faculty as key components of successful professional development initiatives. They may also be useful for designers of similar communities as they decide how to prioritize time and resources to meet specific goals.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

U.S. CMS - PURSUE (Program for Undergraduate Research SUmmer Experience)

Students from under-represented populations, including those at minority serving institutions have traditionally faced many barriers that have resulted in their being under-represented in High Energy Physics. These barriers include lack of research infrastructure and opportunities, insufficient mentoring, lack of support networks, and financial hardship, among many others. Recently the U.S. CMS Collaboration launched a pilot program U.S. CMS - PURSUE (Program for Undergraduate Research SUmmer Experience) to address these barriers. A 10-week paid internship program, the very first of its kind in an HEP experiment, was organised during the summer of 2022. Students were selected predominantly from Minority Serving Institutions with no research program in HEP. This pilot program provided a structured hands-on research experience under the mentor-ship of U.S. CMS scientists from several collaborating institutions. In addition to emphasis on hands-on research, the program offered a set of software training modules for the first few weeks. These were interleaved with a series of lectures every week covering a broad range of topics. The students were exposed to cutting-edge particle physics research and developed a broad set of skills in software, computing, data science, and machine learning. The modality of this program was virtual, due to the unknown circumstances following the pandemic. There is plan to continue the internship program annually, with in-person training and research participation. In this paper, we describe the experience with the pilot program U.S. CMS - PURSUE.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Summary Report of the Topical Group on Career Pipeline and Development (CommF2) Community Engagement Frontier Snowmass 2021

The HEP faculty hire job market has stayed fairly plateaued over the years not keeping up with number of postdocs and PhD produced seeking such employment. Physicists who seek jobs outside this realm face challenges. For example those hired as faculties at predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUI) and community colleges (CC) face hurdles to keep with research due higher teaching load and funding challenges. At the same time those who seek employment in industry may find themselves in unprepared territory despite marketable skills. New job opportunities seeking HEP developed skills have appeared in data science, machine learning and quantum computing. Given that a vast majority transition to the industry jobs, we must strengthen the existing paths for this transition and develop new ways to facilitating it. A strong engagement between HEP and its alumni would boost this process. At the same time those who stay in academia but choose to work at PUIs or CCs must be enabled to continue to pursue research and receive support and guidance for funding. PUIs and CCs serve as a gateway to opportunities for inclusiveness beyond national labs and academic research institutions offering an early starting point in the pipeline that can mitigate issues of lack of diversity and underrepresented participation of different groups in HEP. This report summarises the study undertaken to investigate these issues in HEP community and provide findings and recommendations.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

A Qualitative Analysis to Simple Harmonic Motion

This paper proposes a qualitative analysis to the simple harmonic motion for students who are not mathematically well-prepared. It uses the variation in speed and acceleration to sketch the velocity-time curve. The curve appears to be sinusoidal, whose shape is largely determined by the fact that the gradient of a velocity-time graph is acceleration. This approach cannot determine the exact value of period and claim the curve to be sinusoidal, however, it complements rigorous mathematical analysis in that it is full of physical reasoning that the mathematical approaches lack of.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Ongoing effects of pandemic-imposed learning disruption on student attitudes

We present a study on the development of Finnish first-year physics majors' attitudes towards physics, as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey, before, during and after the period of mandatory remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic. We find that in the years before the pandemic, these attitudes did not change, but the period of extended remote learning due to the pandemic had a negative effect on the students' expert-like views. Similarly, the students who experienced the remote learning period in high school displayed a lower level of expert-like thinking as they entered university. As contact teaching resumed, moderate positive gains were seen, bridging some but not all of the gap in student attitudes left by the pandemic.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Public Education and Outreach

This article summarizes recommendations made by the Community Engagement Frontier conveners as part of the 2022 Snowmass process. It suggests that institutions involved in high energy physics (e.g., universities, national laboratories, funding agencies, etc.) add education and outreach as a valuable effort and one that should be considered in hiring and promotion decisions.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2023

Schroedinger cats and quantum complementarity

Complementarity tells us we cannot know precisely the values of all the properties of a quantum object at the same time: the precise determination of one property implies that the value of some other (complementary) property is undefined. E.g.the precise knowledge of the position of a particle implies that its momentum is undefined. Here we show that a Schroedinger cat has a well defined value of a property that is complementary to its ``being dead or alive'' property. Then, thanks to complementarity, it has an undefined value of the property ``being dead or alive''. In other words, the cat paradox is explained through quantum complementarity: of its many complementary properties, any quantum system, such as a cat, can have a well defined value only of one at a time. Schroedinger's cat has a definite value of a property which is complementary to ``being dead or alive'', so it is neither dead nor alive. Figuratively one can say it is both dead and alive. While this interpretation only uses textbook concepts (the Copenhagen interpretation), apparently it has never explicitly appeared in the literature. We detail how to build an Arduino based simulation of Schroedinger's experiment based on these concepts for science outreach events.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Galaxy-Classification Activity for All Ages

Classification is a general tool of science; it is used to sort and categorize biological organisms, chemical elements, astronomical objects, and many other things. In scientific classification, taxonomy often reflects shared physical properties that, in turn, may indicate shared origins and/or evolution. A "hands-on" galaxy-classification activity developed and implemented by Professional Development Program (PDP) participants, for a high-school summer STEM enrichment program, has been adopted for various age groups and venues, from young (K-3) to college students. We detail the basic tools required, outline the general activity, and describe the modifications to the activity based on learners' ages and learning objectives. We describe the facilitation strategies learned through PDP training and used when implementing the activity, including prompts to motivate the students. We also discuss how we connected the classification process to astronomy and science more broadly during the concluding remarks.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Using Pre-/Post-Quizzes Intentionally in Curriculum Development and Evaluation

Developing the final summative assessment of a course at the start of curriculum development is an implementation of "backward design," whereby learning objectives are identified first and the curriculum is engineered end-to-beginning to achieve them. We trained in backward design through the Professional Development Program (PDP) and adapted PDP assessment ideas for evaluation of curriculum designs and teaching efficacy. A pre-/post-quiz is an assessment administered the first and last day of a course; a learner's scores are used to measure normalized gain: the ratio of what a student learned during a course relative to what they knew entering it. The intentional process of developing a pre-/post-quiz for every course focuses the educator on the essential understanding desired of the learners exiting the course. The normalized-gain statistics for the course can then be used to evaluate the course's efficacy, and improvements to the curriculum can be monitored by tracking the normalized gains over time, using the same pre-/post-quiz. Moreover, an individual instructor may self-evaluate their teaching efficacy by tracking normalized gains from all courses over time. Here we discuss applying the practice of backward curriculum design starting with a custom pre-/post-quiz and utilizing it for immediate and longitudinal evaluation, focusing primarily on designing an entire undergraduate science course.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Hello Quantum World! A rigorous but accessible first-year university course in quantum information science

Addressing workforce shortages within the Quantum Information Science and Engineering (QISE) community requires attracting and retaining students from diverse backgrounds early on in their undergraduate education. Here, we describe a course we developed called Hello Quantum World! that introduces a broad range of fundamental quantum information and computation concepts in a rigorous way but without requiring any knowledge of mathematics beyond high-school algebra nor any prior knowledge of quantum mechanics. Some of the topics covered include superposition, entanglement, quantum gates, teleportation, quantum algorithms, and quantum error correction. The course is designed for first-year undergraduate students, both those pursuing a degree in QISE and those who are seeking to be `quantum-aware'.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Intrinsic motivation, Need for cognition, Grit, Growth Mindset and Academic Achievement in High School Students: Latent Profiles and Its Predictive Effects

Recent efforts to identify non-cognitive predictors of academic achievement have especially focused on self-constructs, whose measurement is concerned with a specific domain (e.g., mathematics). However, other important factors, such as character and motivation, have received less attention. Additionally, the predictive accuracy of non-cognitive factors lacks evidence from subjects including English and Science. In this study, we take a person-centered approach and focus on students' intrinsic motivation, need for cognition, grit, and growth mindset. We mainly focus on how these factors predict students' mathematics, English, and science grades between 9th grade and 12th grade. 2,308 samples from high school students in Boston (Female = 1,237; aged from 13 to 17). The research results indicated that: (1) four latent profiles of students emerged: High in grit students (n = 997, 43.2%, higher scores of grit); Moderate students (n = 905, 38.3%, moderate in all scores); High in intrinsic motivation students (n = 252, 11.8%, higher scores of intrinsic motivation); Low in grit students (n = 154, 6.7%, lower scores of grit); (2) students' gender, race, maternal education level, and social-economic ranking predicted the profiles; and (3) four profiles of students had a significant predictive effect on Mathematics, Science and English scores in both 9th grade and 12th grade. We discussed the importance of character education for adolescents and motivation for learning in high school.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Uma proposta metodologica para a aprendizagem: reflexao sobre as praticas pedagogicas da Estatistica ao elaborar os instrumentos de pesquisa sociais

Presents a differentiated teaching proposal that allows the student to be the agent in the construction of knowledge, overcoming the difficulties that Mathematics presents. Aiming to understand how the use of statistical tools can contribute to the improvement of the teaching-learning process and the construction of statistical knowledge, studied with students from the University Campus of Rondonopolis/UFMT. In order to reach the proposed objective, an analysis was carried out about the didactic activities in the teaching of basic statistics in which a qualitative-quantitative approach was chosen, focusing on everyday life, with the use of software, creation and simulation of models, as well as seeking to establish the frequency of the students' attitude, through questionnaires and a four-point Likert Scale, seeking data that would trace the profile of the actors involved that would help in the understanding of the planned didactic activities. The study is justified by the lack of methodological theoretical references on the subject in question. Didactic activities of Statistics were organized, whose applications took place in alternating classes, being traditional lectures and practical classes in a Computer Laboratory. Constituting the main focus of characterization and reflection of this scientific research during the teaching-learning process of Statistics. The results showed a correct attitude of the researched about the methodological strategies used, assumed with reference to the research/action design. This study contributed to motivate, awaken and answer questions and give meaning and understanding to works with Mathematical Modeling, as it can promote the improvement of the teaching-learning process and configures itself as an indispensable tool for education.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Use of a smartphone camera to determine the focal length of a thin lens by finding the transverse magnification of the virtual image of an object

In this work we have determined the focal length of a concave lens by photographing the virtual image of an object by a smartphone camera. We have similarly determined the focal length of a convex lens by forming a virtual image of an object keeping it within the focal distance from the lens. When a photograph is taken by a smartphone, the transverse width of the image on the sensor of the camera in pixels can be read off by software available freely from the internet. By taking a photograph of the virtual image from two positions of the camera separated by a distance along the line of sight of the camera, we have determined the transverse width of the virtual image. From this we find the focal lengths of the lenses knowing the transverse width and the distance of the object from the lenses.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Development of Soft Skills via IYPT

We investigated how students perceive the role of IYPT (www.iypt.org) participation in their development of soft skills. We also investigated how students teachers assess the contribution of YPT participation to students soft skills development. Third, we link self-reported soft-skill development to performance in research tasks, as assessed by international panels of experts in the context of a physics competition. Taken together, the three steps, by triangulating the relationship between inquiry-based learning and soft-skill development, allow building inference about how inquiry-based learning helps students build soft skills, and how these soft skills influence student performance in research tasks. The data for the three stages includes 308 student responses for stage one, 33 teacher responses for stage two, and 794 expert (teachers, researchers, and university professors) assessments of student performance for stage three. Condensing the detailed findings from our analysis, we suggest thirteen guidelines for developing soft skills in students below.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Rediscovering Practice and Inquiry in Academic Education: Experiences in a European University Environment

I describe the design and implementation of a series of university MSc courses in Switzerland and in Italy on the topic of Cosmic Structure Formation whose goal has been to provide to the students a formative experience using interwoven research practice and fundamental scientific content. The course educational framework, which is based on the ISEE Inquiry Framework, emphasizes science, as much in teaching as in research, as a set of practices, rediscovering and actualizing in modern terms the original pivotal role which these practices had in education in ancient times. In particular, the courses focus on formative, intuitive, student-centered and dialogic learning in opposition to the informative, mnemonic, teacher-centered and monologic teaching of frontal lecture based instruction, which is still the dominant teaching framework in university education, at least in Europe. I describe how course activities are designed in such a way as to mirror authentic research, including all aspects which are usually not practiced in lecture-based courses and standard laboratories (e.g., generating and refining questions; making and testing assumptions; developing one's own research path; and sharing, explaining and justifying ideas and results with peers). Finally, I discuss the major outcomes of the courses and the main challenges which were faced in order to provide to the students a truly transformative experience which could allow them to improve both as learners and future scientific researchers, as well as members of a larger community.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2024

Names from Greek Myth in Fundamental Physics

Greek mythology supplies fundamental physics with the names of numerous (100+) experiments, machines, codes, and phenomena. I present the central narrative of Greek mythos via these names. Hyperlinks are provided for their physics counterparts, and the names are collected in myth- and physics-themed indices.

physics.pop-ph↗