The use of innovative technologies in education offers new possibilities that complement classroom teaching and may also help to improve the quality of education, enabling students to actively participate in the learning process. With this in mind, in 2009 the…

The energy-loss straggling of zirconia (ZrO2) and alumina (Al2O3) has been experimentally determined for proton and alpha-particle beams mainly by means of the Rutherford backscattering technique and in some few cases using the transmission method. The incident energies of the…

We have calculated the inelastic mean free path, stopping power, and energy-loss straggling of swift electron, proton, and α-particle beams in a broad incident energy range in four organic polymers: poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), Kapton, polyacetylene (PA), and poly(2-vinylpyridine) (P2VP). These…

The effect of bulk and surface excitations to inelastic scattering in low-energy electron beam irradiation of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) is studied using the dielectric formalism. Calculations are based on a semiempirical dielectric response function for MWCNTs determined by means…

Accurate approximate closed-form solutions for the cubic-quintic Duffing oscillator are obtained in terms of elementary functions. To do this, we use the previous results obtained using a cubication method in which the restoring force is expanded in Chebyshev polynomials and…

An experimental apparatus was designed and built to allow students to carry out heat conduction experiments in hollow cylinders made of different materials, as well as to determine the thermal conductivity of these materials. The evolution of the temperature difference…

We use a simulation code, based on Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo, to investigate the depth-dose profile and lateral radial spreading of swift proton beams in liquid water. The stochastic nature of the projectile-target interaction is accounted for in a…

An approximate scheme for obtaining the period of a simple pendulum for large-amplitude oscillations is analysed and discussed. When students express the exact frequency or the period of a simple pendulum as a function of the oscillation amplitude, and they…

The electronic stopping cross section (SCS) of Al2O3 for proton beams is studied both experimentally and theoretically. The measurements are made for proton energies from 40 keV up to 1 MeV, which cover the maximum stopping region, using two experimental…

Purpose: We provide a short overview of optical-data models for the description of inelastic scattering of low-energy electrons (10–10,000 eV) in liquid water. The effect on the inelastic scattering cross section due to different optical data and extension algorithms is…