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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A Lab Skills Diagnostic Test, John Zwart Jul 2020

A Lab Skills Diagnostic Test, John Zwart

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The American Association of Physics Teachers recommends that physics majors have proficiency in the following lab skills: constructing knowledge, modeling, designing experiments, analyzing and visualizing data, and communicating physics. I have developed a brief multiple-choice questionnaire to assess incoming students’ lab skill level in these areas. It was administered as both a pre-test and post-test for the first semester of introductory calculus-based physics. Preliminary results indicate that little improvement on the skills tested occurs without explicit instruction.


Got Science? Club, Nora Husein, Randa Ismail Apr 2020

Got Science? Club, Nora Husein, Randa Ismail

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

Got Science? Club allows students to learn about the science that can be found in our daily lives using everyday items such as food and school supplies. Students will learn about these sciences through hands-on experiments, allowing them to truly experience the science around them.


Quasielastic Lepton Scattering And Back-To-Back Nucleons In The Short-Time Approximation, S. Pastore, J. Carlson, S. Gandolfi, R. Schiavilla, R. B. Wiringa Jan 2020

Quasielastic Lepton Scattering And Back-To-Back Nucleons In The Short-Time Approximation, S. Pastore, J. Carlson, S. Gandolfi, R. Schiavilla, R. B. Wiringa

Physics Faculty Publications

Understanding quasielastic electron and neutrino scattering from nuclei has taken on new urgency with current and planned neutrino oscillation experiments, and with electron scattering experiments measuring specific final states, such as those involving nucleon pairs in "back-to-back" configurations. Accurate many-body methods are available for calculating the response of light (A <= 12) nuclei to electromagnetic and weak probes, but they are computationally intensive and only applicable to the inclusive response. In the present work we introduce a novel approach, based on realistic models of nuclear interactions and currents, to evaluate the short-time (high-energy) inclusive and exclusive response of nuclei. The approach accounts reliably for crucial two-nucleon dynamics, including correlations and currents, and provides information on back-to-back nucleons observed in electron and neutrino scattering experiments. We demonstrate that in the quasielastic regime and at moderate momentum transfers both initial- and final-state correlations and two-nucleon currents are important for a quantitatively successful description of the inclusive response and final-state nucleons. Finally, the approach can be extended to include relativistic-kinematical and dynamical-effects, at least approximately in the two-nucleon sector, and to describe the response in the resonance-excitation region.