Abstract:

Learning quantum optics is a challenge for students in higher education, due to counterintuitive concepts or the difficulty to associate mathematical notions to real-world phenomenons. Practical work is used as a way to overcome these barriers through active learning and observation, but they are often difficult to set up in a classroom environment, due to experimental complexity or even cause security issues, through the use of some electro-optical systems such as lasers, modulator... In an experiment session, student’s manipulations are often limited to fine tuning of selected parts of the optical assembly to mitigate the complexity of the task. The general picture of the experiment is often lost because of the multiplicity of power cables, signals, and all the measuring/control instruments that clutter up the visual space. This makes it difficult to grasp.They can also be intimidated by the cost of some optical components.
To answer these problems, we propose HQBIT (Hybrid Quantum Bench for Innovative Teaching), a tangible and AR (Augmented Reality) optical bench to perform Quantum Optics experiments, based on the HOBIT (Hybrid Optical Bench for Innovative Teaching) project. HQBIT is an hybrid system that allows the user to reproduce quantum optics experiments in a real-time simulated environment, using tangible reproductions of optical elements, and augmented reality to provide pedagogical information. This simulation possesses all the optical components (detectors, nonlinear crystal, pulsed laser..) and light characteristics (photons statistics, entanglement), required to recreate quantum optics phenomenons. This system was designed directly in collaboration with physicians working in the optics field to ensure the precision and accuracy of the simulation.Using HQBIT students can reproduce from scratch, key quantum optics experiments such as Alain Aspect’s experiment, that demonstrate the entanglement between a pair of photons, or the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, that illustrate wave-particle duality. Both of these notions enter in conflict with the perception of our world and pose conceptual difficulties.
We propose a set of pedagogical supports that aims to help the students tackle these challenges. They provide help during the practical setup and manipulation of the optical components and directly link the results and the concepts underlying these experiments by using dedicated visualizations that evolve with student manipulations of the elements. In our future work, we will study the transferability of the skills gained on HQBIT to real optical bench during quantum optics experiments.

Keywords:

Quantum Physics, Practical Work, Augmented Reality, Optics, Tangible Interactions.