Web-based Initiatives in Physics and Materials Education

• A Java Applet for solving the Schroedinger equation has been developed by Kevin Schmidt of ASU and Michael Lee of Kent State.
• There are many nice Quantum Physics Applets prepared by Manuel Joffre of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. This site is very impressive, with many examples, and quite a bit of personal history in both English and French; maybe it is en route to commercial success. However, it does seem to take a while to download from US-based sites. It has been incorporated into a book...
• A more recent US site, that owes a lot to the above French site, but is more user-friendly and quicker to download, is on the Physics Education Technology site at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This is an impressive answer by Carl Wieman and his team to the difficult question of what to do after winning the Nobel Prize for Physics ( in 2001). A local version of some of these Quantum Simulations are available within our current PHY 571 course shell.
• Meanwhile, on the same theme, some other QP applets have been produced by Mark Sutherland originally from University of Toronto, but this site is now installed somewhere in Oxford University in England; the graphics are intuitive and interactive.
• I am linking to some Quantum Physics Resources (i.e. this page) this semester with my students in Quantum Physics. This includes use of the Physlets developed by Wolfgang Christian and coworkers at Davidson College, who published the corresponding book Physlet Physics, which contains a CD with many examples including quantum physics. You can see the structure of this CD-ROM; the quantum stuff is in Chapter 10 and Chapter 18. A local version of the H-atom orbitals is available on this site.
• Most recently Mario Belloni and Wolfgang Christian have published a book, Physlet® Quantum Physics: An Interactive Introduction. Wolfgang was one of invited speakers at the 5th Workshop on Multimedia in Physics Teaching and Learning in Vienna, Austria in October, 2000, and at several meetings since then. The Davidson group is currently concentrating on Open-source Physics.
• You can probably get there before we do by visiting the World Lecture Hall and choosing Quantum Chemistry or Quantum Physics. A further (now obvious) choice is to search the web using the wonderful Google search engine, type in something specific such as "Quantum Physics course", and you will be amazed what you find. (If you are a gambler at heart, type in "Quantum Physics course" and hit "I'm feeling lucky". Isn't that great?)
• And, No, I don't get paid by any of these people.