Teaching Quantum Physics Between Quantum Technology and General Education

C. Gregory Hood

Liam Doyle, Fargol Seifollahi, Chandralekha Singh

The rapid growth of quantum information science and technology (QIST) presents unique educational challenges as it brings together students and researchers from many disciplines. This work presents findings from in-depth interviews with leading quantum researchers who are also educators, whose perspectives provide guidance for developing a framework for interdisciplinary QIST teaching and builds on our earlier paper that focused on QIST courses and curricula. We discuss quantum educators’ reflections on three critical aspects of QIST education: (1) the development of a common interdisciplinary language, (2) determining appropriate levels of abstraction and physical detail for diverse student populations from various disciplines, and (3) why students should pursue courses, degrees, and careers in this rapidly evolving field. Our analysis reveals that the emergence of linguistic evolutions such as “qubits” and “measurement bases”, rather than a focus on measurement of physical observables and their corresponding Hermitian operators, has begun to create a unifying framework that transcends disciplinary boundaries. Nevertheless, educators face ongoing challenges in balancing the level of abstractness with physical details as well as mathematical rigor with conceptual accessibility, particularly when teaching foundational QIST courses to an interdisciplinary group of students. The experts emphasize that successful QIST education for an interdisciplinary student body not only requires a shift from traditional quantum mechanics pedagogy for physics majors, but careful consideration of students’ diverse prior conceptual and mathematical foundations overall. They encourage students to pursue QIST related courses, degrees, and careers, highlighting the unique historical opportunity to participate in creating transformative quantum technologies while developing transferable skills for an evolving technological landscape. These findings provide valuable guidance for developing a framework for interdisciplinary QIST teaching especially useful for foundational courses.

Paola Verrucchi

YIN Zhenqiang CHEN Wei, 银振强, Zhengfu HAN +1 more

Quantum information is a new discipline with the intersection of quantum physics and information technology,which has developed rapidly recently and has been on the road of industrialization.In contrast,the severe shortage of the practitioners,who can understand quantum information technology in depth,have become bottlenecks restricting the development of this technology.The lack of talent stems is from the lack of education,especially for the undergraduate students of engineering.Benefitting from the vigorous growth of quantum information in China,the fundamental of infiltrating the quantum information course in the undergraduate education of engineering can be performed,and some positive effects have been achieved.The course has carried out the teaching reforms,and practices in terms of teaching objectives,curriculum structure,practical methods,which have gained good teaching results.These teaching experiences and ideas provide a valuable reference for quantum information education in the cyberspace security discipline.

Marco Giliberti

Alion Alizoti

This paper discusses the introduction of quantum ideas in general physics and education. Considering the fragile environment of physics education, the paper suggests three possible ways to help teaching and learning of quantum physics, (1) quantum metrics (2) simple experiments demonstrating quantum quantities (3) fractal and quantum analogies between worlds. From this perspective, this paper is also meant to be a test indicator of quantum popularity in physics and education.