Student understanding of Fermi energy, the Fermi-Dirac distribution and total electronic energy of a free electron gas

Abstract

We investigated the difficulties that physics students in upper-level undergraduate quantum mechanics and graduate students after quantum and statistical mechanics core courses have with the Fermi energy, the Fermi-Dirac distribution and total electronic energy of a free electron gas after they had learned relevant concepts in their respective courses. These difficulties were probed by administering written conceptual and quantitative questions to undergraduate students and asking some undergraduate and graduate students to answer those questions while thinking aloud in one-on-one individual interviews. We find that advanced students had many common difficulties with these concepts after traditional lecture-based instruction. Engaging with a sequence of clicker questions improved student performance, but there remains room for improvement in their understanding of these challenging concepts.

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• Development and validation of a sequence of clicker questions for helping students learn addition of angular momentum in quantum mechanics
• Validation and Administration of a Conceptual Survey on the Formalism and Postulates of Quantum Mechanics
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Validation and Administration of a Conceptual Survey on the Formalism and Postulates of Quantum Mechanics
• Challenges in addressing student difficulties with time-development of two-state quantum systems using a multiple-choice question sequence in virtual and in-person classes
• Challenges in addressing student difficulties with measurement uncertainty of two-state quantum systems using a multiple-choice question sequence in online and in-person classes
• Challenges in addressing student difficulties with basics and change of basis for two-state quantum systems using a multiple-choice question sequence in online and in-person classes
• Improving student understanding of quantum measurement in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space using a research-based multiple-choice question sequence