Quantum physics has become fashionable but is often misused in so many ways, that to prevent our high school students from becoming victims of
abuses of quantum terminology, we made them play with quantum physics and its principles.
Coming from the Grenoble urban area and Chambéry, 236 high school students were able to familiarize themselves, thanks to the |Hop⟩ game, with electron transport through jumps — hence the name of the game — on a crystal lattice, following rules inspired by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, energy and momentum conservation, interactions between magnetic field and the electron spin, etc., while taking into account the lattice topology, be it square, triangular or kagome.
Twelve Ph.D students, postdoctoral fellows and researchers from PHELIQS and CEA-LETI/DOPT/LIPS laboratories took turns explaining the rules and showing our high school students that their “electrons”— small wooden cubes —could not do anything, but could also do surprising things, thanks to tunnelling, for example. They also directly experienced the constraints imposed by finite energy on physical processes,
i.e. possible game actions as players — from two to four — share only eight quanta of energy.
The game, which is multiform, allows adding effects of repulsive or attractive interactions, vacancy creation, ionization — the electron is then lost, etc., which reflect the immense variety of electronic transport properties in materials.
|Hop⟩ was designed and created in 2019 by a physics Ph.D student from the University of Geneva, João Ferreira. You can find out more at the
hopquantumgame.com website that he dedicated to the game.
Many of the high school students literally got caught up in the game and showed great interest. What could be a better way to motivate them to do science and become our future students and researchers?
And, do not forget, 2025 will be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. See you at the next Science Fair...