Female university students do much better in introductory physics exams if they have the option of retaking the tests. That’s according to a new analysis of almost two decades of US exam results for more than 26 000 students. The study’s authors say it shows that female students benefit from lower-stakes assessments – and that the persistent “gender grade gap” in physics exam results does not reflect a gender difference in physics knowledge or ability.
The study has been carried out by David Webb from the University of California, Davis, and Cassandra Paul from San Jose State University. It builds on previous work they did in 2023, which showed that the gender gap disappears in introductory physics classes that offer the chance for all students to retake the exams. That study did not, however, explore why the offer of a retake has such an impact.
In the new study, the duo analysed exam results from 1997 to 2015 for a series of introductory physics classes at a public university in the US. The dataset included 26 783 students, mostly in biosciences, of whom about 60% were female. Some of the classes let students retake exams while others did not, thereby letting the researchers explore why retakes close the gender gap.
When Webb and Paul examined the data for classes that offered retakes, they found that in first-attempt exams female students slightly outperformed their male counterparts. But male students performed better than female students in retakes.
This, the researchers argue, discounts the notion that retakes close the gender gap by allowing female students to improve their grades. Instead, they suggest that the benefit of retakes is that they lower the stakes of the first exam.
The team then compared the classes that offered retakes with those that did not, which they called high-stakes courses. They found that the gender gap in exam results was much larger in the high-stakes classes than the lower-stakes classes that allowed retakes.
“This suggests that high-stakes exams give a benefit to men, on average, [and] lowering the stakes of each exam can remove that bias ” Webb told Physics World. He thinks that as well as allowing students to retake exams, physics might benefit from not having comprehensive high-stakes final exams but instead “use final exam time to let students retake earlier exams”.
Earlier this year I met the Massachusetts-based steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum at the Global Physics Summit of the American Physical Society. He was exhibiting a beautiful sculpture of a “quantum engine” that was created in collaboration with physicists including NIST’s Nicole Yunger Halpern – who pioneered the scientific field of quantum steampunk.
I was so taken by the art and science of quantum steampunk that I promised Rosenbaum that I would chat with him and Yunger Halpern on the podcast – and here is that conversation. We begin by exploring the art of steampunk and how it is influenced by the technology of the 19th century. Then, we look at the physics of quantum steampunk, a field that weds modern concepts of quantum information with thermodynamics – which itself is a scientific triumph of the 19th century.
This podcast is supported by Atlas Technologies, specialists in custom aluminium and titanium vacuum chambers as well as bonded bimetal flanges and fittings used everywhere from physics labs to semiconductor fabs.
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Progression of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability: Initially, an applied force (grey arrows) destabilizes the fluid interface between spin-up (blue) and spin-down (yellow) sodium atoms. The interface then develops nominally sinusoidal modulations where currents counterflowing in the two fluids (coloured arrows) induce vorticity at the interface (black symbols). The modulations subsequently acquire characteristic mushroom or spike shapes before dissolving into a turbulent mixture. (Courtesy: Taken from Science Advances11 35, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adw9752, licensed under CC BY-NC http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.)
Researchers in the US have replicated a well-known fluid-dynamics process called the Rayleigh-Taylor instability on a quantum scale for the first time. The work opens the hydrodynamics of quantum gases to further exploration and could even create a new platform for understanding gravitational dynamics in the early universe.
If you’ve ever tried mixing oil with water, you’ll understand how the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) can develop. Due to their different molecular structures and the nature of the forces between their molecules, the two fluids do not mix well. After some time, they separate, forming a clear interface between oil and water.
Scientists have studied the dynamics of this interface upon perturbations – disturbances of the system – for nearly 150 years, with major work being done by the British physicists Lord Rayleigh in 1883 and Geoffrey Taylor in 1950. Under specific conditions related to the buoyant force of the fluid and the perturbative force causing the disturbance, they showed that this interface becomes unstable. Rather than simply oscillating, the system deviates from its initial state, leading to the formation of interesting geometric patterns such as mushroom clouds and filaments of gas in the Crab Nebula.
An interface of spins
To show that such dynamics occur not only in macroscopic structures, but also at a quantum scale, scientists at the University of Maryland and the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) created a two-state quantum system using a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of sodium (23Na) atoms. In this state of matter, the temperature is so low, the sodium atoms behave as a single coherent system, giving researchers precise control of their parameters.
The JQI team confine this BEC in a two-dimensional optical potential that essentially produces a 100 µm x 100 µm sheet of atoms in the horizontal plane. The scientists then apply a microwave pulse that excites half of the atoms from the spin-down to the spin-up state. By adding a small magnetic field gradient along one of the horizontal axes, they induce a force (the Stern-Gerlach force) that acts on the two spin components in opposite directions due to the differing signs of their magnetic moments. This creates a clear interface between the spin-up and the spin-down atoms.
Mushrooms and ripplons
To initiate the RTI, the scientists need to perturb this two-component BEC by reversing the magnetic field gradient, which consequently reverses the direction of the induced force. According to Ian Spielman, who led the work alongside co-principal investigator Gretchen Campbell, this wasn’t as easy as it sounds. “The most difficult part was preparing the initial state (horizontal interface) with high quality, and then reliably inverting the gradient rapidly and accurately,” Spielman says.
The researchers then investigated how the magnitude of this force difference, acting on the two sides of the interface, affected the dynamics of the two-component BEC. For a small differential force, they initially observed a sinusoidal modulation of the interface. After some time, the interface enters a nonlinear dynamics regime where the RTI manifests through the formation of mushroom clouds. Finally, it becomes a turbulent mixture. The larger the differential force, the more rapidly the system evolves.
Spin up and spin down: Experimental setup showing the vacuum chamber where the sodium atoms are prepared. (Courtesy: Spielman-Campbell laboratory, JQI)
While RTI dynamics like these were expected to occur in quantum fluids, Spielman points out that proving it required a BEC with the right internal interactions. The BEC of sodium atoms in their experimental setup is one such system.
In general, Spielman says that cold atoms are a great tool for studying RTI because the numerical techniques used to describe them do not suffer from the same flaws as the Navier-Stokes equation used to model classical fluid dynamics. However, he notes that the transition to turbulence is “a tough problem that resides at the boundary between two conceptually different ways of thinking”, pushing the capabilities of both analytical and numerical techniques.
The scientists were also able to excite waves known as ripplon modes that travel along the interface of the two-component BEC. These are equivalent to the classical capillary waves –“ripples” when a droplet impacts a water surface. Yanda Geng, a JQI PhD student working on this project, explains that every unstable RTI mode has a stable ripplon as a sibling. The difference is that ripplon modes only appear when a small sinusoidal modulation is added to the differential force. “Studying ripplon modes builds understanding of the underlying [RTI] mechanism,” Geng says.
The flow of the spins
In a further experiment, the team studied a phenomenon that occurs as the RTI progresses and the spin components of the BEC flow in opposite directions along part of their shared interface. This is known as an interfacial counterflow. By transferring half the atoms into the other spin state after initializing the RTI process, the scientists were able to generate a chain of quantum mechanical whirlpools – a vortex chain – along the interface in regions where interfacial counterflow occurred.
Spielman, Campbell and their team are now working to create a cleaner interface in their two-component BEC, which would allow a wider range of experiments. “We are considering the thermal properties of this interface as a 1D quantum ‘string’,” says Spielman, adding that the height of such an interface is, in effect, an ultra-sensitive thermometer. Spielman also notes that interfacial waves in higher dimensions (such as a 2D surface) could be used for simulations of gravitational physics.
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