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 potentially long-lived state of a system; for example, a supersaturated solution or an excited atom.

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

meta- +‎ stability

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Examples

  • Tagged: bubble of doom, metastability, Supersymmetry

    April « 2008 « Imaginary Potential 2008

  • Tagged: bubble of doom, metastability, Supersymmetry

    False Vacua I: The End of the Universe As We Know it « Imaginary Potential 2008

  • 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

  • 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

  • For about the tenth time this past month in my daily blog I again underscored the danger of metastability.

    Patrick Takahashi: The Bailout Bill Passes Congress, President Signs the Legislation, and the World Is Saved. Not. 2008

  • If this is the shape GW will take, then the notion of bistability and metastability seem not very useful.

    Allen and Tett 1999 « Climate Audit 2006

  • 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

  • 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

  • Furthermore, the authors investigated several characteristic properties of yeast prions including curability and metastability.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Marc Erhardt et al. 2010

  • The results suggest that a thermodynamic assessment of protein metastability may be useful for integrating bio - and geochemical observations.

    BioMed Central - Latest articles 2008

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