Ligand in coordination chemistry 2026-10-20
Light-dependent reactions Created 2026-10-13 Updated 2026-10-20
In a chloroplast, light-dependent reactions take place at thylakoid membranes. Chlorophyll captures light; electron transfer helps establish an electrochemical gradient across the thylakoid membrane, enabling formation of ATP. The oxygenic photosynthesis pathway also forms NADPH and releases molecular oxygen from water. ATP and NADPH become available in the chloroplast stroma for the Calvin cycle. See Alberts et al.: chloroplast light reactions.
Light-emitting diode Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
A light-emitting diode is a semiconductor diode producing electroluminescence under electric current. Forward bias injects electrons and electron holes; radiative electron-hole recombination emits photons. A double heterostructure uses band offsets to retain both charge carriers in an active layer. A sufficiently thin layer is a quantum well.[ref]
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.87.1139. §I, p. 1139, Fig. 1; §IV.A, pp. 1143–1144: injection, active layer and quantum-well distinction
The optical and electrical questions are different: photon energy sets a color scale, while light-emitting diode efficiency determines how much supplied energy escapes as light. The blue light-emitting diode made compact white light-emitting diodes and full-color displays practical. A modulated light-emitting diode can also supply the optical signal in a chopped-light lock-in experiment.
Blue light-emitting diode: carrier injection, emitting structure and optical readout
. Original functional schematic of a representative indium gallium nitride quantum well device on sapphire, not a reconstruction of the 1989 or 1994 devices. Layer thicknesses are schematic. Separate electrical and optical readings determine different properties: terminal electric potential difference and electric current, spectrum, and calibrated escaping optical power. The arrows represent routes through the device rather than a calculated energy band profile. Source. Details. Light-emitting diode efficiency Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Efficiency has several denominators. Specify a steady electric current , positive terminal electric potential difference , and a simplified narrow emission spectrum with photon energy . Assume at most one radiative photon per injected electron and electron hole pair. Let be the fraction of the electrical pair-supply rate reaching the active layer, the fraction of those pairs recombining radiatively, and the fraction of internally emitted photons that escape. Then counting the successive events givesDefine internal quantum efficiency here conditionally on pairs reaching the active layer: . The internal photon yield per electrical pair is instead . Stating this convention matters when another definition folds injection into internal quantum efficiency. The external quantum efficiency and wall-plug efficiency areThese are photon-count and energy-flow identities for the declared model. For a broad spectrum, replace by the mean escaping photon energy, weighted by photon number, when computing optical power.
A stipulated example chooses , , , , and . For every 100 electrical pairs, 90 reach the active layer, 72 emit internally, and 36 photons escape. Thus , not . Using givesThe dimensional analysis is transparent: , , and . The optical and electrical efficiencies differ because differs from the chosen .
The factors suggest different improvements. Better confinement can reduce injection leakage; suppressing nonradiative recombination raises the radiative fraction; improving light extraction efficiency helps already-emitted photons escape. A photon trapped by total internal reflection has already passed the radiative step and can still be lost through absorption. Improving extraction therefore need not change the internal radiative fraction.
Shuji Nakamura's lecture cautions that why indium gallium nitride emits efficiently despite many defects was not completely settled in that account.[ref]
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.87.1139. §IV.B, pp. 1144–1145: high defect density, localization hypothesis and stated uncertainty
As an independent consistency check on the 1994 reported values, treating its broad spectrum as monochromatic at the peak givesThis agrees at the quoted precision with the reported . Its optical/electrical power ratio is instead . The first estimate uses a peak in place of a photon-number-weighted mean, so agreement is a consistency check rather than an exact reanalysis of the measured spectrum.
Linear Stark effect in the first excited hydrogen eigenspace Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Consider a fixed proton and one electron, omitting spin, fine structure and the Lamb shift. Let be the elementary charge, the Bohr radius in this fixed-nucleus model, and . Because the electron's electric dipole moment is , its electric-dipole interaction isThe first excited hydrogen eigenspace has a common unperturbed energy eigenvalue . Write and in the hydrogen energy eigenbasis. The electric-dipole selection rules for hydrogen leave only the coupling within this eigenspace. Each diagonal matrix element vanishes by parity, but that does not make the entire perturbation vanish. Degenerate perturbation theory requires its eigenvalues in the whole eigenspace. With the usual real wavefunction phases the off-diagonal position matrix element is .[ref]
Linear Stark Effect. Quantum Mechanics by Richard Fitzpatrick; Fitzpatrick, Linear Stark Effect, equations (7.82)–(7.86)
The factor three can be checked directly. Set and use normalized radial wavefunctions and spherical harmonics:The angular integral is . Including and the radial volume factor then givesReversing the quantum phase of reverses this sign, with no change to the predicted energy eigenvalues.
Thus the nontrivial two-dimensional block and its determinant equation areConsequently, for the displayed sign convention,The two remaining energy eigenstates have zero first-order shifts. The slopes correspond to opposite electric dipole moments, and . The electric field selects combinations of opposite parity that already have these dipole expectations at leading order. This is why applying first-order nondegenerate perturbation theory separately to and , and obtaining two zero diagonal entries, misses the splitting.
The approximation requires small compared with the separation to other principal quantum numbers. For real hydrogen atoms, it also requires the relevant electric-dipole interaction to dominate the small splittings omitted here, including the Lamb shift. At sufficiently small electric fields a pre-existing nonzero – separation must be retained before taking the limit. A simple two-state illustration with unperturbed separation has shifts relative to its meanFor , the lower branch moves by relative to its zero-field value. At the splitting is linear. This interpolation explains the importance of the hydrogen energy-level degeneracy; it is not a complete model of the fine structure multiplet.
Lithium iron disulfide battery 2026-10-20
A primary battery using metallic lithium and iron disulfide. The overall discharge conversion consumes four lithium atoms and releases four electrons per formula unit. This is distinct from the rechargeable host-to-host transport in a conventional lithium-ion battery.
Lone pair Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
A lone pair is an electron pair assigned to one chemical atom without a connecting line to another chemical atom in a Lewis structure. It is usually shown as two dots. Water has two lone pairs on oxygen, accounting for four valence electrons; ammonia has one lone pair on nitrogen, accounting for two. In , each oxygen has two lone pairs, and carbon has none.
A lone pair can be reactive. In protonation of ammonia, the nitrogen lone pair becomes a new bond pair to a proton:The proton supplies no electron, so the eight valence electrons are retained: three bond pairs plus one lone pair become four bond pairs. The resulting nitrogen has formal charge ; each hydrogen has formal charge zero. This is why identifying an available lone pair helps explain the chemical base behaviour of ammonia, rather than merely decorating its formula.
Lewis already used the ammonia to example in The Atom and the Molecule (1916), pp. 777–778. In modern terms the dots identify an allocation of electrons, not two stationary particles or an isolated patch unaffected by the rest of the molecule. A molecular orbital description can spread electronic amplitude over several chemical atoms while a localized Lewis structure remains useful for acid-base chemistry.
Long-path projection of a magnetic correlation Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
For constant electron density, common path length , and a solenoidal isotropic spectral tensor, the rotation-measure correlation contains the window . As becomes large compared with the correlation length, this window acts as within the integral. The transverse projector then has component one, yielding the displayed two-dimensional Fourier transform. For finite , the windowed integral retains longitudinal modes and endpoint corrections. The method of using such rotation measure correlations to infer magnetic spectra is developed by Enßlin and Vogt.
Lorentzian quasiparticle spectral peak Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
A normalized retarded amplitude , with constant , has Fourier transform . Consequently is the displayed positive Lorentzian line shape, of unit frequency integral. Its maximum is at and its half width at half maximum is . The energy half-width is . Amplitude decays on time whereas probability decays on time . A general interacting electron has quasiparticle residue and incoherent spectral weight in addition to this normalized local pole model; frequency-dependent width or self-energy can invalidate a global Lorentzian.
Lossless two-channel thickness scattering model Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Consider an original illustrative model with exactly two outgoing scattering channels: a central beam and one diffracted beam . Let be specimen thickness and a constant coupling with units of inverse length. Normalize the probability amplitudes to incident probability current, assume equal longitudinal speeds, and specifyThese ordinary differential equations define a lossless toy model, not a fit to the silicon example or a complete theory of crystal scattering. Differentiating once more gives , soThe identity expresses conservation within these two scattering channels. Alternatively, substituting the ordinary differential equations into makes the two cross terms cancel. Here ideal bright-field transmission electron microscopy accepts fraction and rejects fraction ; ideal dark-field transmission electron microscopy accepts precisely the rejected channel. This complementarity requires the declared two-channel completeness and absence of loss.
Even with known , thickness is ambiguous: and both give . Near , ; extending that approximation through a full oscillation would erase the ambiguity incorrectly. The model isolates reversible transfer between probability amplitudes; it does not say that every thicker specimen must look darker.
Real dark-field transmission electron microscopy usually collects only a subset of the directions rejected in bright-field transmission electron microscopy. Other elastic scattering directions, inelastic scattering and detector losses prevent a general two-image conservation rule. To keep loss and background separate, extend the counting model explicitly. Let be the fraction absent from both recorded beam channels, describe the remaining fraction, be incident count per exposure, the detector efficiency and its mean additive background. Then the expected value of recorded count isFor separately acquired equal-illumination exposures with known , the two corrected mean counts sum to , not necessarily . Removal from these channels is not synonymous with physical absorption: an electron can leave the chosen acceptance or change kinetic energy without being stopped in the specimen. Background subtraction removes a mean offset, but its counting variance remains.
Low-spin complex 2026-10-20
A low-spin complex has the smaller-spin occupancy favored when ligand-field splitting outweighs the cost of pairing electrons in the lower orbitals. An octahedral low-spin center has and total spin zero.
LS coupling Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
An atomic addition of angular momentum scheme in which the individual orbital angular momentum vectors first combine into and the individual spins into , then these combine into total angular momentum . When spin-orbit coupling is weak compared with the interactions between electrons described by electrostatics, and remain useful approximate quantum numbers. The Landé g-factor describes the resulting weak-field magnetic splitting.
Lyman-alpha emission Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-20
Radiative decay from the hydrogen level to produces a Lyman-alpha photon. In an optically thin collisionally excited gas, escape of this photon removes the excitation energy deposited by an electron collision. The excitation threshold is responsible for the rapid temperature sensitivity of this cooling channel.
Magnetic electron lens Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
A magnetic electron lens uses a solenoid around the beam axis; iron pole pieces concentrate its magnetic field.[ref]
The Development of the Electron Microscope and of Electron Microscopy by Ernst Ruska. Ruska, §§C and E, Fig. 4: iron enclosure and pole-piece lens
A strictly axial trajectory in a perfectly uniform axial magnetic field experiences no Lorentz force, since . Near the entrance, a radial field component turns an advancing electron azimuthally; the resulting sideways velocity in the axial magnetic field also produces a radial Lorentz force. This couples image rotation and focusing. Real trajectories bend smoothly, whereas a thin lens diagram compresses that bending into one effective plane. Magnetic length Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
For an electron in a uniform perpendicular magnetic field of magnitude , the magnetic length sets the orbital length scale of a Landau level; is the positive elementary charge.
Magnetic orbital 2026-10-20
Magnetomechanical angular momentum balance Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Let be the axial magnetic dipole moment, where is the axial magnetization. Write for the internal angular momentum associated with that magnetic dipole moment, and for the body's rotational angular momentum, with moment of inertia . In a regime admitting a constant signed gyromagnetic ratio , axial conservation of angular momentum givesHere names the internal reaction torque on the body, not an additional external torque. The external term includes the suspension. The model assumes that the changing internal angular momentum is transferred to the measured mechanical motion, with other storage or escape channels negligible on the observation timescale. A changing or non-collinear mixture of orbital angular momentum and spin angular momentum need not admit a single constant .
During a reversal fast compared with the mechanical response, with negligible external angular impulse, integrating the balance givesFor and an electronic , the body acquires : its initial rotation is toward by the right-hand rule. Reversing the reversal reverses the impulse. Over a complete periodic cycle, , so the net reaction angular impulse vanishes; a resonant alternating response does not imply steadily accumulating angular momentum.
The orbital angular momentum prediction can be derived without a material model. A charge traveling around a circle of radius at angular frequency has loop electric current and magnetic dipole moment . Its orbital angular momentum is , hence, for an electron with electric charge ,The electron magnetic moment associated with intrinsic spin instead obeysHere is the elementary charge, is the electron mass, and is the electron spin g-factor.[ref]
The magnetic moment of the electron by Polykarp Kusch. pp. 299–300: orbital and intrinsic moments and the Dirac value
Thus the same change of magnetic dipole moment corresponds to about half as much transferred angular momentum in the pure-spin model as in the orbital angular momentum model. This factor of two is a relation between magnetic dipole moment and angular momentum, not evidence that an electron is literally a rotating charged sphere. In a material with both contributions, the inferred coefficient is a material-dependent magnetomechanical gyromagnetic ratio. Magnetron sputtering 2026-10-20
A sputter-deposition method using a magnetic field near a target to confine electrons and sustain ionization efficiently. Multiple targets permit co-deposition. A local flux proportional to target power is a useful calibration model over a restricted range, rather than a universal linear law for composition or thickness.
Mass spectrometry Created 2026-10-13 Updated 2026-10-20
Mass spectrometry separates and detects ions according to mass-to-charge ratio. It can distinguish isotopes which belong to the same chemical element but have different atomic masses. The instrument measures ions: interpreting the result as a neutral atomic mass requires accounting for electron removal and its ionization energy. For a singly positive ion in its ground state, , where is the electron rest mass, is the ionization energy, and is the speed of light.
For a simple illustrative analyzer, positive ions of mass and electric charge gain kinetic energy across an electric potential difference before entering a transverse uniform magnetic field . The Lorentz force supplies centripetal acceleration, soAt fixed and , the measured bending radius separates mass-to-charge ratios, not masses independently of electric charge. This ideal model assumes negligible initial kinetic energy and speeds small compared with the speed of light; the historical focusing mass spectrograph used the geometry described below.
The experimental achievement is to turn invisible differences between individual ions into separated, calibrated positions. Aston velocity focusing explains how an early mass spectrograph sharpened its images; the velocity-selected magnetic mass analyzer provides an independent model whose equations can be checked directly. The magnesium isotope mass spectrum shows why position, width, and intensity carry different information.
Mass–thickness contrast 2026-10-20



