Resumen de Physical Review Lettersin the Classroom

Paul J. Angiolillo, Jonathan Lynch

• Ask any physicist what the preeminent journal in the field is, and I think the almost unanimous answer will be Physical Review LettersPRL. This weekly journal of the American Physical Society publishes highimpact research from all the major subdisciplines of physics. This journal is not the one you would think is the first place a high school physics teacher or college professor teaching introductory physics would look to find material for his or her class. But to the contrary, what better way to excite young minds to the wonders of physics than to introduce them to the primary source material? Often times, the articles in PRLaddress what to the casual observer would be considered rather simple phenomena. However, as we in the discipline know, it is these simple phenomena that are difficult to understand and explain. In this paper, we have surveyed a fiveyear period of PRLand have chosen two papers from which to conduct further experimentation, experimentation that is designed to be simple, make use of common materials and inexpensive apparatuses, and consequently be accessible to most high school settings or adopted for individual student projects.