Bulletin of the American Physical Society
87th annual meeting of the Southeastern Section of the APS
Volume 65, Number 19
Thursday–Friday, November 5–6, 2020; Virtual
Session F05: AMO Physics and Physics Education |
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Friday, November 6, 2020 11:00AM - 11:12AM |
F05.00001: DSMC Simulation of Collision Process in Argon-Nitrogen Mixed Gaseous Thermal Plasma. Sahadev Pradhan The collision process in Argon-Nitrogen mixed gaseous thermal plasma consist of electrons and heavy particles is studied using Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) simulations to understand the effect of large mass ratio (electron and heavy particles) on collision rate when each species specified as a separate collision group as well as all the species in a single group for number of simulated particles per cell ($F_{N})$ in the range 2 \textless $F_{N\thinspace }$\textit{\textless 200, }with eight sub-cells per cell. \quad By including the separate collision group for each species the collision rates between heavy particles as well as among electrons and heavy particles with $F_{N} \quad =$ 200 and 20 are in excellent agreement with the theoretical value, to within 5{\%}. However, the mean spacing between collision pair is increased and the selection is forced beyond the sub-cell. This also leads to an increase in the overall acceptance rate of collision pairs The comparison reveals that the inclusion of all the species in a single group become overwhelming when electrons are present. The very low $F_{N\thinspace \thinspace }$value$ (F_{N\thinspace }=$\textit{2) }results in an excessive increase \quad in mean spacing between collision pairs, and the error in the collision rate turn out to be very significant -/a [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 6, 2020 11:12AM - 11:24AM |
F05.00002: Fourth- and Fifth-Order Virial Coefficients from Weak Coupling to Unitarity Yaqi Hou, Joaquin Drut Due to its simplicity, experimental accessibility, and universality across various fields, ranging from condensed matter to nuclear physics, the unitary Fermi gas has been one of the most intensively investigated systems of the last two decades. At finite temperature, one widely used tool to study the thermodynamics of such a system is the virial expansion, whose spirit is to encode the many-body physics into a series of n-body contributions, captured by the virial coefficients $b_{n}$. Implementing a new nonperturbative analytical method, featuring only systematic uncertainties, we have calculated the $b_{n}$ of a Fermi gas from weak coupling to the unitary point. Our method reproduces the exact $b_{3}$ and supports a previous conjecture for $b_{4}$, thus resolving the long-standing disagreement between theory and experiment. Pushing on to $b_{5}$ for the first time, we use the Pade resummation and find agreement with experimental measurements of various thermodynamic properties. Applying our expansion to polarized matter, we find excellent agreement with Monte Carlo calculations. Preliminary results up to the ninth order coefficient are also presented. Connections to low-energy nuclear physics and generalizations to other systems and observables are also discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 6, 2020 11:24AM - 11:36AM |
F05.00003: Electric Fields from Geometry Spencer Tamagni, Costas Efthimiou Using techniques from geometry and complex analysis in their simplest form, we present a derivation of electric fields on surfaces with non-trivial topology. A byproduct of this analysis is an intuitive visualization of elliptic functions when their argument is complex-valued. The underlying connections between these techniques and the theory of Riemann surfaces are also explained. Our goal is to provide students and instructors a quick reference article for an extraordinary topic that is not included in the standard books. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 6, 2020 11:36AM - 11:48AM |
F05.00004: An Investigation into the State of North Carolina Physics Education: Racial and Gender Equity. Timothy Osborn, Alice Churukian Utilizing a demographic survey combined with a well-established concept survey (the Force Concept Inventory), this project seeks to gain insight into the state of high school physics education in North Carolina. The survey was administered, pre-instruction, to students enrolled in first semester college physics at several institutions within the University of North Carolina system. While the overall study is broader in scope, early analysis of the data has revealed significant differences of mean scores on the concept survey when categorized by the race and/or gender of the participant. In particular, even when controlling for the highest level of physics course taken in high school, significant differences exist between the mean scores on the concept survey for men and women. I will share how these differences point to the existence of larger factors at play in determining how well a student will learn physics beyond simply what course they have taken. Future work on this project will focus on investigating how these differences manifest and what other factors play similar roles in determining how students throughout North Carolina interact with high school physics education. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 6, 2020 11:48AM - 12:00PM |
F05.00005: Head-Fake Learning Justin G Hadad Head-fake learning (“HFL”) is a form of teaching material wherein the students do not realize the form or complexity of what they are learning. This occurs primarily when the mechanism through which the material is taught makes the students think they are learning something entirely different, i.e. how to succeed in Minute to Win It style mini-games instead of learning projectile motion. We discuss how we utilized HFL to present introductory physics and mathematical principles in a newly designed course at UNC entitled “Game Show Theory,” which uses game show structure and optimal play as a driving motivator. In addition, we will present examples of student work and testimonials regarding how they interacted with the course (and its HFL methodology) and will show small-scale game show demonstrations which teach physics concepts with minimal cost. [Preview Abstract] |
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