Questions tagged [terminology]
Use this for questions relating to the proper use of physics terminology or nomenclature.
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What is the difference between selection efficiency and acceptance in high energy physics?
Often in papers the product of these two quantities is mentioned, but I'm not sure what exactly they mean separately.
My guess would be that one of these is the fraction of the events that you are ...
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Physical interpretation: weighted eigenvalues of the Laplacian with a potential
I'm a mathematician with only the basic knowledge of Physics, so my question may be trivial: in this case, mercy me. :-)
Let $\Omega \subseteq \mathbb{R}^N$ be a domain and let $V,m:\Omega \to \...
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What does it mean by "condensation" of anyons?
My question is motivated from the paper Boundary degeneracy of topological order by Juven Wang and Xiao Gang Wen.
Consider a (2+1)D system with boundary, described by abelian Chern-Simons theory. Due ...
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How is the BCS ground state a coherent state?
A coherent state is defined as the eigenstate of the annihilation operator $\hat{a}$. It can be obtained from the vacuum of the number operator by acting with displacement operator: $$|z\rangle=\hat{D}...
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What is the general definition of a quench?
I've seen the term "quench" used in many different contexts.
It's easy to understand the meaning when the context has a simple physical analogue, such as lowering the temperature of a system to cause ...
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What is the name of the physics concept where water runs back under the edge of the roofing? Is it just surface tension?
I work as an apprentice roofer and I'm interested in the why of things. Nobody I have asked can confidently answer this question so here I am.
This diagram shows the phenomenon:
The image is from ...
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What is altermagnetism?
Since 2022, I have come across several papers on Altermagnetism, a novel phase of matter that breaks time reversal, but without a net magnetization. It also has many other interesting properties.
What ...
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What does the term 'high voltage' really mean?
This might be a dumb question but i am not so familiar with the word voltage:
What does the textbooks really mean when they say high voltage?. Does that mean:
There are more charges so more voltage, ...
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What are pre-collisions and post-collisions in forces and momentum?
What are pre-collision and post-collision exactly? I assume it is before collision and after collision. I can not find an answer on google.
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Is the phrase "coupling constant" interchangable with " strength of interactions"?
Can I use the terms coupling constant and strength of interactions, interchangeably, or are there more subtleties to the term coupling constant that I am not aware of?
Coupling Constants from ...
user81619
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What is a Fermi arc?
What is meant with a Fermi arc in the context of Weyl semimetals?
Is this the just a one-dimensional Fermi surface? For example, in electron-doped graphene, the Fermi surface consists of 2 disjoint ...
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What does the term 'a uniform RVB spin-liquid state' mean?
I encountered this term a uniform RVB spin-liquid state in some articles, for example, see the paragraph under Eq.(29) on page 9 in this paper.
What does the word 'uniform ' mean? Simply from the ...
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What does it mean to probe a certain energy scale?
For example, what does it mean that the LHC probe the electroweak scale, $M_{EW} \sim 10^3 GeV$? Also why is this energy called the electroweak scale?
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Terminology of different equilibria?
I've heard many equilibrium terms:
Translational equilibrium
Rotational equilibrium
Static equilibrium
Dynamic equilibrium
The different terminology is slightly confusing. My understanding is as ...
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What is a stochastic electromagnetic wave?
In statistical optics we always talking about stochastic electromagnetic wave but I am not able to understand how this wave is different from electromagnetic wave
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