Speaker
Description
In physics education, experiments play a crucial role in testing and validating theoretical concepts, providing empirical evidence to support or refute existing theories, and allowing students to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world scenarios by observing and measuring physical phenomena. Quantum mechanics has unique limitations in experimentation due to the lack of easily conductible experiments, the lack of affordable equipment needed to conduct true quantum experiments, and the lack of physicality present in existing quantum experiments for students. Our study is situated in a course designed to engage physics majors in discussions of real quantum experiments like the Mach-Zehnder interferometer through tutorial-based simulations. This talk focuses on how students in this course compare the mathematical formalism with the discussion of quantum experiments in terms of their level of understanding and their preferences, and how they relate formalism and experiment to the phenomena of quantum measurement.
