Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb Present participle of diffract.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • In all of the following examples, ice crystals or water droplets act like prisms — refracting, reflecting, diffracting and dispersing the light that shines on, or passes through them to produce these startling arrays.

    Celestial Phenomena 2008

  • While acknowledging the skepticism of so many directed at this tsunami cloaking device, we have to confess to being quite mesmerized, to the detriment of our rational faculties, by the incredibly poetic image of these barriers submerged in the gloomy depths: a flooded forest of concrete colossi diffracting sunlight into its own prismatic corridors.

    Anti-Tsunami Landscapes 2008

  • A perfect non-diffracting beam requires infinite energy and again cannot be made, but approximations to Bessel beams will propagate over appreciable distances without significant diffraction.

    Making light follow a curve (updated) « Skulls in the Stars 2007

  • Another well-known example are so-called ‘non-diffracting’ beams, which maintain their original shape and size without spreading on propagation.

    Making light follow a curve (updated) « Skulls in the Stars 2007

  • While acknowledging the skepticism of so many directed at this tsunami cloaking device, we have to confess to being quite mesmerized, to the detriment of our rational faculties, by the incredibly poetic image of these barriers submerged in the gloomy depths: a flooded forest of concrete colossi diffracting sunlight into its own prismatic corridors.

    Archive 2008-09-01 2008

  • He met her wide earnest eyes, noted again how artlessly open her silvery blue gaze seemed — and how, if one looked deeper, there were layers, refracting, diffracting, in those fascinating eyes.

    The Ideal Bride Laurens, Stephanie 2004

  • Cardillo, who was diffracting neutral helium atoms from semiconductor surfaces as a means of diagnosing their structures, presumably on the theory that my proper niche at Bell would be as

    Robert B. Laughlin - Autobiography 1999

  • They swarmed around his father, diffracting the light a bit.

    Far Beyond the Stars Steven Barnes 2000

  • They swarmed around his father, diffracting the light a bit.

    Far Beyond the Stars Steven Barnes 2000

  • (X-ray beams are scattered against electrons in the diffracting atoms, and the hydrogen atom has only one electron).

    Press Release: The 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics 1994

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