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[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] We discuss how research on student difficulties was used as a guide to develop, validate, and evaluate a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) to help students learn how to determine the completely symmetric bosonic or completely antisymmetric fermionic wave function and be able to compare and contrast them from the case when the particles can be treated as distinguishable. We discuss how explicit scaffolding is designed via guided teaching-learning sequences for two- or three-particle bosonic and fermionic systems to help students develop intuition about how to construct completely symmetric and antisymmetric wave function, both when spin part of the wave function is ignored and when both spatial and spin degrees of freedom are included. Published by the American Physical Society2025
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Nonconventional thermal states of interacting bosonic oligomers
There has recently been a growing effort to understand the physics and intricate dynamics of many-body and many-state (multimode) interacting bosonic systems in a comprehensive manner. For instance, in photonics, nonlinear multimode fibers are being intensely investigated nowadays due to their promise for ultrahigh-bandwidth and high-power capabilities. Similar prospects are being pursued in connection with magnon Bose-Einstein (BE) condensates, and ultracold atoms in periodic lattices for room-temperature quantum devices and quantum computation, respectively. While it is practically impossible to monitor the phase space of such complex systems (classically or quantum mechanically), thermodynamics has succeeded in predicting their thermal state: the Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) distribution for classical fields and the BE distribution for quantum systems. These distributions are monotonic and promote either the ground state or the most excited mode. Here, we demonstrate the possibility to advance the participation of other modes in the thermal state of bosonic oligomers. The resulting nonmonotonic modal occupancies are described by a microcanonical treatment, while they deviate drastically from the RJ/BE predictions of canonical and grand-canonical ensembles. Our results provide a paradigm of ensemble equivalence violation and can be used for designing the shape of thermal states. Published by the American Physical Society2024
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- PAR ID:
- 10641686
- Publisher / Repository:
- aps
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Review Research
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2643-1564
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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