Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 5
Saturday–Tuesday, April 17–20, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session H17: Tools, Techniques and Strategies for Physics EducationEducation Live Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FED Chair: Eric Brewe, Drexel University |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 10:45AM - 10:57AM Live |
H17.00001: Poor Helmholtz! Ettore Budassi, Chiara Aimè, Daniele Aurelio, Diego Maragnano, Paolo Montagna, Michele Pirola, Simone Restelli, Davide Santostasi, Simone Venturini, Luca Zatti We present an experimental measurement of the speed of sound based on Helmholtz resonators that students can recreate by themselves using only everyday items. A few ordinary glass bottles, a kitchen scale, a ruler and a free cell-phone app is all that is required to carry out a reasonable estimation of the speed of sound with a $10\%$ uncertainty. The Helmholtz theory of resonances is introduced and tested by blowing across the top of a bottle with different volumes of water, and the frequency of the ensuing note is measured using the microphone of any modern smartphone. This experience has been proposed many times to high school students and teachers with a positive opinion. Despite the overall inexpensiveness and run-of-the-mill setup, the activity covers a variety of topics, ranging from harmonic oscillators to adiabatic processes in gases. On top of this, thanks to this experience, students face some typical measurement problems, such as search for error sources, error analysis, function linearization, and data fitting. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 10:57AM - 11:09AM Live |
H17.00002: The Misunderstood Greenhouse Effect Luca Zatti, Chiara Aimè, Daniele Aurelio, Ettore Budassi, Diego Maragnano, Paolo Montagna, Michele Pirola, Simone Restelli, Davide Santostasi, Simone Venturini We propose a thrilling way to show and teach the greenhouse effect theoretically and experimentally to an audience of high-school teachers and students. The goal is to reveal its paramount importance for life on our planet with the right scientific approach. We use simple instruments, like a thermometer, a plastic box, and a light bulb, to simulate the heating process of the surface of the Earth by the Sun. The clear box cover, representing the atmosphere, can be removed, allowing for the experiment with and without the greenhouse effect. Concurrently with the experiment, an effective estimate of the Earth surface temperature can be done. With only a few tools, such as basic math and the Stephan-Boltzmann law, surprising results can be obtained. Without the greenhouse effect life on our planet would be very difficult, with a mean temperature of $-19^\circ$C. Assuming the Earth and the atmosphere as black bodies, the mean temperature reaches $30^\circ$C, but a more realistic value can be found just by considering them as grey bodies. This simple experiment introduces the problem of global warming and sensitizes the audience to the fragile equilibrium between man and Nature. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 11:09AM - 11:21AM Live |
H17.00003: The ``TenDaysPhysics4Teenagers'' Experience in Pavia Chiara Aime', Daniele Aurelio, Ettore Budassi, Diego Maragnano, Paolo Montagna, Michele Pirola, Simone Restelli, Davide Santostasi, Simone Venturini, Luca Zatti For almost a decade, the Physics Department of the University of Pavia, in northern Italy, has been offering a summer school ``TenDaysPhysics4Teenagers'' to around thirty high-school students from various cities. The attendees are presented with a theoretical and experimental introduction to modern physics (nuclei and particles, condensed matter, medical physics, astrophysics). The program involves lectures, lab sessions, guided tours to the Pavia nuclear reactor and to the University Museum, and a weekend of observational astronomy. Being in close contact with professors, researchers, and students of the Department, the attendees can sate their curiosity and whet their critical attitude in a friendly and informal atmosphere. Due to the CoViD-19 pandemic, the 2020 summer school was readapted to avoid lab sessions; live experiments during the seminars were introduced, and the number of in-presence attendees was cut. However, thanks to the lectures live streaming, we reached about fifty participants overall. This school has proved to be an effective way to promote physics to high school students, as shown by the number of former attendees (15/35 for 2019 edition) now enrolled in our Department. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 11:21AM - 11:33AM Live |
H17.00004: Must physics teachers know philosophy? If yes, which one? Leonardo Colletti Physics is more than a booster for technology. It is a way of looking at the world that contributes to everyone's cultural growth. This must be emphasized when physics is taught at a high school level, that is, when the audience is only in small part made up of students who will later pursue STEM-type careers in college. Moreover, a physics teacher has the responsibility to get the message across to as many students as possible, so that the investment of physics education does not result in a waste of resources. In order to make a cultural approach to physics influential, interdisciplinarity is the key: a broad horizon fosters learning by students with diverse interests. Among the various possibilities for drawing cross-cultural connections, here I illustrate what philosophical topics physics teachers should be familiar with and provide a few examples of how they can be profitably used in physics classes. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 11:33AM - 11:45AM Live |
H17.00005: Flywheel Battery as a Teaching Tool in Introductory Physics Colin Choudhary, Jeff Klupt, James Overduin We investigate the potential of flywheel batteries as teaching tools in introductory physics courses. A flywheel battery stores energy in the form of rotational kinetic energy. Electrical energy from other, preferably renewable sources (such as solar power during the daytime) is used to spin up a rotating mass. That energy can then be drawn off when renewable sources are not available (at night, for instance), slowing the flywheel back down. Such a project has tremendous potential, not just as a source of clean power, but also as a way of attracting the interest of students who want to use physics to build a better world. We report on the construction and testing of a classroom demonstration model in which a small flywheel is spun up using the electrical current from a solar cell, and then spun back down as current is drawn into a capacitor or series of LED indicators. We also discuss how such a proof of principle can be scaled up to something like the 40 MW flywheel energy storage facility operated by Convergent Power in Hazle, PA, within driving distance of our home institution. Finally, we share the reactions of introductory physics students upon experiencing this demonstration in class. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 11:45AM - 11:57AM Live |
H17.00006: Bringing the physics back into the junior-senior undergraduate quantum mechanics course James Freericks Quantum mechanics instruction has remained relatively unchanged for at least 75 years, following a coordinate-space-based formalism that requires significant class time for instruction on the mathematical background for the Frobenius method, delta functions, Fourier transforms, and the like. This mathematics instruction, greatly limits the amount of physics that can be included. In this talk, I will tell you how to reverse this trend. In Fall 2020, I taught a one-semester junior-level quantum mechanics course at Georgetown University that worked within a representation independent formalism (emphasizing operators, not wavefunctions). It is mathematically much simpler and frees up significant time for discussing conceptual ideas and physical ideas. I was able to discuss important experiments in detail such as Stern-Gerlach, delayed choice, EPR, Bell inequality tests, Hong-Ou-Mandel, Pickering-Fowler lines, discovery of deuterium, proton radius, electron momentum spectroscopy, time of flight, hyperfine interactions and radio astronomy, cyclotron resonance and MRI, single-photon detection, homodyne detection, and how squeezing is employed to improve LIGO. Come to the presentation and see how you can adopt such a framework for your class as well. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 11:57AM - 12:09PM Live |
H17.00007: Remote prototyping of Physics experiments in Higher Education. Julian Felix Valdez, Magdalena Waleska Aldana Segura During the Pandemic situation in 2020, Professors and students were forced to quickly adapt to new methodologies and ways of communication. Quality of Education was some of the issues raised as if it was possible to keep students interested, engaged and at the same, to get high quality contents that will provide them the necessary tools for their professional development. Using virtual communication, it was possible to design, build and simulate 14 prototypes to be characterized from the International Elementary Particle Laboratory, remotely during the first semester of 2020. These prototypes will be used to further analyze cosmic ray radiation, whilst at the same time, students are provided with the unique opportunity to acquire new skills, update their software management and learn new computational tools that will allow them to acquire, analyze and publish data obtained with one of kind, original prototypes. The final intention is to get students to publish at least 14 articles, during 2020 with the data obtained from these innovations, and to be able to test these prototypes at the Test Beam Facilities at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory during 2022. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 12:09PM - 12:21PM Live |
H17.00008: Updates to the NNDC's Web Interfaces Benjamin Shu, Alejandro Sonzogni The National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) makes evaluated nuclear physics data available to the public through its various websites. Several of these websites provide graphical interfaces which give users control over how they find data. The most prominent example would be the NuDat website's interactive chart of nuclides, which visualizes patterns across all 3,387 observed nuclei. Recently, this interface was reprogrammed to streamline navigation through the entire chart. It has also been redesigned for general use across multiple applications, starting with the NuDat and ENSDF websites. The present work is part of an ongoing effort to modernize the NNDC's web interfaces and this talk will highlight some examples. Through projects such as these, the NNDC intends to make its web services more accessible and more convenient for use in nuclear physics education. Work sponsored by the Office of NP, Office of Science of the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02- 98CH10886 [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 18, 2021 12:21PM - 12:33PM Live |
H17.00009: Perovskite Devices Stability? Effect of Ruddleson Popper Perovskites with Liquid Crystal Based Novel Hole Transporters Qurat Ul Ain, Mohsin Raza, Shahzad Akhtar Ali, Ammar Ahmed Khan Among the emerging photovoltaic (PV) devices, Perovskite solar cell (PSC) devices are essential due to their competitive efficiencies, easy processing with a flexible structure, and less cost. These devices are not yet in commercial use due to their unavoidable instabilities under humidity and thermal effects. Therefore, we aim to make stable PSC devices by using multi-dimensional perovskite along with the mesogens discotic liquid crystals-based hole transport layers(HTLs). We investigated the optoelectronics properties of Butyl, octyl, and phenethyl-ammonium iodide incorporated RP phased perovskite structures with a specific left shift in bandgap and photoluminescence peaks. Mesogenic HTLs have promising self-assembled characteristics in terms of stability, cost, core size, and hole mobility with favorable conduction along the columnar axis. We compared their conduction characteristics with commercial HTLs with the help of UV-Vis, conductivity measurements, and SEM analysis. Finally, PSCs devices were tested for external quantum efficiency and photovoltaic performance. Hence we checked how device efficiency and the lifetime effected by increasing the hydrophobic character of its material layers. And through contributing to this research, we find a novel aspect to emerging PVs. [Preview Abstract] |
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