written by Emily Marshman and Chandralekha Singh

Dirac notation is often used in upper level quantum mechanics courses, but students struggle with this representation. To investigate the difficulties that advanced students  (i.e., upper-level undergraduate and graduate students) have while translating state vectors in Dirac notation to wave functions in position and momentum representations, we administered free-response and multiple-choice questions and conducted individual interviews with students. We find that students display common difficulties with these topics.

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Last Modified December 16, 2015

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