The Development of Instruments for Assessment of Instructional Practices in Standards-Based Teaching

We provide a description and rationale for the development of two instruments: 1) a classroom observation protocol; and, 2) a teacher interview protocol—designed to document the impact of reform-based professional development with undergraduate mathematics and science faculty, and its impact on the resultant preparation of teachers. Constructed upon review of the research on teaching and standards documents in mathematics and science, these instruments form the basis for data collection in a three-year longitudinal study of teaching practice among early career teachers as well as undergraduate college faculty. In addition, we suggest further applications of the observation protocol beyond the original purpose of our research study

Kohn-Sham Approach to Quantum Electrodynamical Density Functional Theory: Exact Time-Dependent Effective Potentials in Real Space

The density-functional approach to quantum electrodynamics is extending traditional density-functional theory and opens the possibility to describe electron-photon interactions in terms of effective Kohn-Sham potentials. In this work, we numerically construct the exact electron-photon Kohn-Sham potentials for a prototype system which consists of a trapped electron coupled to a quantized electromagnetic mode in an optical high-Q cavity. While the effective current that acts on the photons is known explicitly, the exact effective potential that describes the forces exerted by the photons on the electrons is obtained from a fixed-point inversion scheme. This procedure allows us to uncover important beyond-mean-field features of the effective potential which mark the breakdown of classical light-matter interactions. We observe peak and step structures in the effective potentials, which can be attributed solely to the quantum nature of light, i.e., they are real-space signatures of the photons. Our findings show how the ubiquitous dipole interaction with a classical electromagnetic field has to be modified in real-space in order to take the quantum nature of the electromagnetic field fully into account

Cavity Born-Oppenheimer Approximation for Correlated Electron-Nuclear-Photon Systems

In this work, we illustrate the recently introduced concept of the cavity Born-Oppenheimer approximation for correlated electron-nuclear-photon problems in detail. We demonstrate how an expansion in terms of conditional electronic and photon-nuclear wave functions accurately describes eigenstates of strongly correlated light-matter systems. For a GaAs quantum ring model in resonance with a photon mode we highlight how the ground-state electronic potential-energy surface changes the usual harmonic potential of the free photon mode to a dressed mode with a double-well structure. This change is accompanied by a splitting of the electronic ground-state density. For a model where the photon mode is in resonance with a vibrational transition, we observe in the excited-state electronic potential-energy surface a splitting from a single minimum to a double minimum. Furthermore, for a time-dependent setup, we show how the dynamics in correlated light-matter systems can be understood in terms of population transfer between potential energy surfaces. This work at the interface of quantum chemistry and quantum optics paves the way for the full ab-initio description of matter-photon systems

Two Stories

Gravity If he was a pet, we\u27d put him to sleep. That\u27s what my sister says. If she was in a story, she would be an unlikeable character. She says this about our father, who\u27s in the hospital with all kinds of problems. Liver, kidneys, heart, you name it. Beeps and burps and monitors screeching

Optimized Effective Potential for Quantum Electrodynamical Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory

We propose a practical approximation to the exchange-correlation functional of (time-dependent) density functional theory for many-electron systems coupled to photons. The (time non-local) optimized effective potential (OEP) equation for the electron- photon system is derived. We test the new approximation in the Rabi model from weak to strong coupling regimes. It is shown that the OEP (i) improves the classical description, (ii) reproduces the quantitative behavior of the exact ground-state properties and (iii) accurately captures the dynamics entering the ultra-strong coupling regime. The present formalism opens the path to a first-principles description of correlated electron-photon systems, bridging the gap between electronic structure methods and quantum optics for real material applications.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

W3C Accessibility Guidelines for Mobile Games

In the past decade, video games have become one of the fastest growing forms or entertainment around the world. In particular, mobile gaming has continued to evolve, becoming increasingly popular for billions of people worldwide. An ongoing issue within this subject is the accessibility issues users' face when playing these types of games. The purpose of this work is to investigate how well current W3C accessibility guidelines support mobile game development. This paper introduces a study that was carried out to determine the current knowledge that participants have of these guidelines, along with the opinions on how important these accessibility guidelines are when creating accessible mobile game content