Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The character of being metastable; specifically, in thermodynamics, equilibrium of the type, neither strictly stable nor unstable, possessed by a medium under certain conditions such as those which exist in the case of an under-cooled liquid.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An
unstable but potentiallylong-lived state of a system; for example, asupersaturated solution or an excitedatom .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the quality of a physical system that persists in its existing equilibrium when undisturbed (or only slightly disturbed) but able to pass to a more stable equilibrium when sufficiently disturbed
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Tagged: bubble of doom, metastability, Supersymmetry
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Tagged: bubble of doom, metastability, Supersymmetry
False Vacua I: The End of the Universe As We Know it « Imaginary Potential 2008
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Possible candidates for an LHC apocalypse include a micro black hole, a magnetic monopole, the incredibly cool vacuum metastability event, or the creation of a strangelet, which could in turn result in an "ice-nine" disaster scenario.
Archive 2008-09-01 Greg Tannahill 2008
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Possible candidates for an LHC apocalypse include a micro black hole, a magnetic monopole, the incredibly cool vacuum metastability event, or the creation of a strangelet, which could in turn result in an "ice-nine" disaster scenario.
Large Hadron Malarkey Greg Tannahill 2008
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For about the tenth time this past month in my daily blog I again underscored the danger of metastability.
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If this is the shape GW will take, then the notion of bistability and metastability seem not very useful.
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The Intel researchers deliberately sample during transitions; they enhanced the randomness even further by tuning the metastability so that the bit falls to one or zero with fairly equal probability, "making it essentially a coin flip," says Taylor.
IEEE Spectrum 2010
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The Intel team engineered the number generator so that in each string of numbers turned out by the machine, every bit is the result of "metastability."
IEEE Spectrum 2010
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Furthermore, the authors investigated several characteristic properties of yeast prions including curability and metastability.
PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Marc Erhardt et al. 2010
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The results suggest that a thermodynamic assessment of protein metastability may be useful for integrating bio - and geochemical observations.
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