An exploration of chemistry students’ conceptions of light and light-matter interactions in the context of the photoelectric effect

Light is used ubiquitously across science and engineering to explore, characterise, understand matter, and catalyse processes. Relative to its utility in science and engineering, very little research has been conducted on how students develop an understanding of light-matter interactions, especially at the quantum level, which is necessary to understand many modern applications. To begin addressing this gap, we present results from a...