Abstract:

For most students at universities of natural sciences, quantum physics (or quantum mechanics) is the field of physics that first convinces them of the seriousness of university studies. In the previous courses, the students generally used the acquired knowledge, which they expanded or deepened per the demands of the highest level of education. In several situations, they could apply their experience with phenomena commonly occurring in everyday life, the surrounding nature, and technical applications. Quantum mechanics is different, at first glance classical laws and logic do not apply to it. We cannot even rely on our own practical experience. In such cases, we tend to reach for analogy. For example, the water model of electric current is well known in the field of electrical engineering, thanks to which, based on the laws of hydrodynamics, we can easily explain the operation of various components. We should be more careful with quantum mechanics, applying an analogy from classical mechanics leads to incorrect results and interpretations. Intuition also often betrays us, where we put a situation from quantum mechanics into an inappropriate context. In the article, we will look at another, according to our experience so far, better approach - we apply the students' knowledge of wave optics to a situation in which we model the movement of a particle (electron) overcoming a potential difference. From the point of view of analogy in optics, we can interpret it as the interface of two environments with different refractive indices. Then solving the unpopular Schrodinger equation turns into working with the well-known wave equation. In the article, we describe the teaching experience in this way in the introductory university physics course. The object of our interest is students who have successfully mastered the high school graduation curriculum and thus wave optics. We will focus on the description and analysis of a specific activity in which students mathematically modeled the movement of a particle in a force field with a changing potential. We applied the concepts (p-prims) from the field of wave optics that they had stored in their minds to a new context, quantum mechanics. It turns out that this is a relatively suitable path that takes the learner from Maxwell's equations through the wave equation to the Schrodinger equation. If we are engaged in qualitative analysis, we can always replace the problem of the movement of particles with the problem of photons, with which we have more experience. At the end of the article, we will present several suggestions for activities where we will extend the optical-quantum analogy method to other contexts and task situations.

Keywords:

Quantum mechanics, optics, college physics, learning sciences, p-prims.