KEYWORDS: Photonics, Engineering, Physics, Analog electronics, Photonic integrated circuits, Scanning transmission electron microscopy, Linear filtering, Integrated optics, Digital signal processing, Microrings
We present a novel framework referred to as Concept Connectivity that aids in educating and engaging students by presenting the topic of the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) in a coherent and unified manner. It uses different analogue implementations of the STR coming from seemingly distinct fields of study such as (i) Optics, (ii) Photonics, and (iii) Electronics to connect not only to the concepts of the STR but to the various concepts from these different fields. In these analogue implementations, the fundamental characteristics of the different STR phenomena can be mimicked in many different ways. Concept Connectivity has two major benefits. First, from an educational perspective, undergraduate students can (i) understand advanced physical phenomena (like STR) from different points of view, (ii) bridge together different learnings or concepts from Physics, Optics, Photonics, and Electronics, and (iii) learn hands-on knowledge and engineering skills from Optics and Electronic experimentations when these analogues are incorporated in undergraduate physics lectures and laboratory courses. In this way, Concept Connectivity contributes to the growing pedagogical approaches used in science education with an emphasis on Photonics, Optics and Electronics. Second, from a research perspective, Concept Connectivity provides undergraduate students with a rare “taste of research experience” related to the challenge of merging different concepts in STR using principles in Optics, Photonics, and Electronics.
Previously, we demonstrated an electronic circuit analogue of one of Special Relativity’s (SR) phenomena called the Relativistic Aberration of Light (RAL) (European Journal of Physics, 42, 015605, 2021), which describes the change in the angle an observer sees a light source relative to their direction of motion at relativistic speeds. It used typical bulky laboratory equipment such as (i) function generators, (ii) oscilloscopes, and (iii) power supplies together with our all-pass filter (APF)-based electronic circuit analogue to perform experiments. In this paper, we present a novel smartphone-based experimental set-up performing the same experiment, but we replace the bulky and expensive laboratory equipment with a low-cost and compact smartphone system that can function as both function generator and oscilloscope. Our smartphone system consists of (i) an Android 8.0 (Oreo) application and (ii) an ESP32-based external module that may be wired or wirelessly interfaced for oscilloscope and signal generation functions. The setup was able to carry out the experiment, however the sampling rate was only limited to 8.5kHz, but with the added input channel, phase shift calculation was much more consistent, albeit with a slight offset of -15 degrees due to the added buffer circuit between the ESP32 and APF circuit. We hope that through our work, we expand the toolset of physics educators and researchers, particularly those in developing countries, especially with our system’s considerations of equipment accessibility, affordability, and simplicity.
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