Colin G. West

Colin G. West
University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Department of Physics

Doctor of Philosophy

About

24
Publications
111,042
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795
Citations
Introduction
My background is in computational quantum information and quantum many-body theory. I'm particularly interested in tensor networks as tools and in topological phases of matter. Lately, I've also been very interested in physics education research, including theories of symbols and metaphors used in teaching physics and in theories of what it means to "understand" a physics concept.

Publications

Publications (24)
Article
We investigate the phase diagram of a quantum spin-1 chain whose Hamiltonian is invariant under a global on-site A4, translation, and lattice inversion symmetries. We detect different gapped phases characterized by a symmetry protected topological (SPT) order and symmetry breaking using matrix product state order parameters. We observe a rich varie...
Article
Full-text available
Over the last decade, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been recognized as a way to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education by engaging students in authentic discovery. CUREs have been shown to have positive benefits similar to traditional undergraduate research experiences; howev...
Article
Full-text available
During my time in graduate school, I was fortunate to spend time working with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. The Center’s most notable feature is its use of techniques from improvisational theater (“improv”) to develop scientists’ public communication skills—an approach that has been borne out in several c...
Article
Full-text available
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have emerged as a promising approach to enhance undergraduate STEM education by engaging students in authentic discovery. CUREs integrate genuine research projects into undergraduate courses, providing students with a real research experience while earning academic credit. While CUREs offer si...
Article
Full-text available
Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counterintuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the h...
Article
Full-text available
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments—timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term’s overall grade—have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular “narrow bundle of skills,” and have been shown in some contexts to produce disparate outcomes between different de...
Preprint
Full-text available
ChatGPT is built on a large language model trained on an enormous corpus of human text to emulate human conversation. Despite lacking any explicit programming regarding the laws of physics, recent work by Kortemeyer (2023) has demonstrated that ChatGPT-3.5 could pass an introductory physics course at some nominal level and register something close...
Preprint
Full-text available
ChatGPT is a groundbreaking ``chatbot"--an AI interface built on a large language model that was trained on an enormous corpus of human text to emulate human conversation. Beyond its ability to shoot the breeze in a plausible way, it has attracted attention for its ability to competently answer questions from the bar exam and from MBA coursework, a...
Article
Full-text available
[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Over the last decade, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been recognized as a way to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education by engaging students in authentic research pra...
Article
Full-text available
A significant focus of the ISEE Professional Development Program (PDP) is identifying authentic STEM practices, so that educators and scientists can develop and assess these practices as intentionally as they would scientific content knowledge. In addition to the classic inquiry-based learning activities, PDP alumni also find themselves using and t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A significant focus of the ISEE Professional Development Program (PDP) is identifying authentic STEM practices, so that educators and scientists can develop and assess these practices as intentionally as they would scientific content knowledge. In addition to the classic inquiry-based learning activities, PDP alumni also find themselves using and t...
Preprint
Full-text available
A considerable share of the literature on physics education and on education more broadly focuses on the principles which should guide the design of courses and of classroom activities. In this short article I wish to place more attention on the unplanned aspects of teaching: specifically, the spontaneous interactions that occur between instructors...
Preprint
We explore the use of short-range entanglement measures, such as concurrence and negativity, and global entanglement measures such as geometric entanglement, as indicators of many-body localization (MBL) in the spectra of disordered spin systems. From the perspective of entanglement monogamy, the two types of entanglement behave oppositely in the t...
Article
We investigate the phase diagram of a quantum spin-1 chain whose Hamiltonian is invariant under a global onsite $A_4$, translation and lattice inversion symmetries. We detect different gapped phases characterized by SPT order and symmetry breaking using matrix product state order parameters. We observe a rich variety of phases of matter characteriz...
Article
We present a numerical scheme for efficiently extracting the higher-order moments and cumulants of various operators on spin systems represented as tensor product states, for both finite and infinite systems, and present several applications for such quantities. For example, the second cumulant of the energy of a state, $\langle \Delta H^2 \rangle$...
Article
Full-text available
This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C. Please not...
Article
Full-text available
The BaBar detector operated successfully at the PEP-II asymmetric e⁺e⁻ collider at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1999 to 2008. This report covers upgrades, operation, and performance of the collider and the detector systems, as well as the trigger, online and offline computing, and aspects of event reconstruction since the beginning...
Article
We present measurements of branching fractions for five B-meson decays to two-body charmless final states. The data, collected with the BABAR detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, represent 459×106 BB̅ pairs. The results for branching fractions are, in units of 10-6 (upper limits at 90% C.L.), B(B+→ηρ+)=9.9±1.2±0.8, B(B0→η′η)=0.5±0.4±...

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