Seed dormancy 2026-10-14
A living seed's restriction on germination under otherwise favorable conditions, distinct from insufficient water, unsuitable temperature or lost seed viability. One failed test cannot diagnose seed dormancy.[ref]
A seismically inferred transition associated with the base of the lithosphere, often identified by a decrease in shear-wave velocity. Its depth and sharpness constrain combinations of temperature, composition, hydration, melt fraction and seismic anisotropy. A sharp discontinuity inside a craton can instead lie within its thick lithospheric mantle.[ref]
Seismic tomography Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-10-20
Seismic tomography infers a spatial model of elastic-wave propagation from many source-receiver observations. Uneven illumination, finite wavelength, parameter tradeoffs and regularization limit its resolution. A seismic-velocity image is not directly an image of temperature or flow velocity.
Seismic velocity 2026-10-25
The propagation speed of a seismic disturbance, depending on elastic properties, density, composition, temperature and microstructure.
Selective potassium equilibrium Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-24
For an ideal dilute chemical solution, moving one mole of a species with signed ion charge number from outside to inside changes its electrochemical potential by
Here is the molar gas constant, the uniform absolute temperature, the Faraday constant, and the concentration. This assumes the same reference chemical potential on both sides. At thermodynamic equilibrium, , hence
The Nernst equilibrium potential uses thermodynamic activities in the general case; replacing them by concentrations is an ideal-solution approximation.
Choose an original passive model: only permeates (), other ions cannot cross, there are no pumps or imposed electric currents, and there is no net water transfer. Stipulate reservoir concentrations and , with , and . Treat reservoir concentrations as effectively unchanged by charging. Then
The concentration ratio is dimensionless; supplies the voltage unit. At , for inward transport, so outward transport is favored. At it vanishes. A more negative favors inward transport. These sign checks explain the result physically.
Keeping the other chosen inputs fixed, doubling to raises by . Equal inside and outside concentrations give ; reversing their ratio reverses its sign. In finite reservoirs, transport changes both concentrations; the exact final thermodynamic equilibrium must also satisfy material conservation. The fixed-reservoir calculation is useful when only a small fraction of the available ions moves.
Self-gravitating Kramers power-law envelope Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-14
For a constant-luminosity radiative envelope with ideal-gas pressure and Kramers' opacity law, impose power laws on enclosed mass, density, pressure and temperature while retaining . If their exponents are , respectively, mass conservation gives , hydrostatic balance gives , the gas law gives , and diffusion gives . Solving gives . In particular . Neglecting envelope self-gravity instead sets approximately constant and changes the exponents to ; that approximation is not an exact solution of mass conservation with nonzero density.
Semiconductor Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-20
A semiconductor has an electronic band gap and a conductivity strongly affected by temperature, impurities and carrier injection. Optical absorption can create mobile electrons and holes, enabling a photodiode.
The useful feature of a semiconductor is that its charge carrier population can be controlled. Semiconductor doping changes the supply of mobile electrons or electron holes; carrier injection changes their population away from thermal equilibrium. A transistor turns that control into an electronic amplifier: a small input signal controls a larger flow of supplied energy.
For a uniform semiconductor in a weak electric field, a simple drift model writes its electrical conductivity as
Here is the elementary charge, are the number densities of mobile electrons and electron holes, and their positive charge carrier mobilities. The two contributions add because opposite electric charges drift in opposite directions and therefore carry electric current in the same direction. This model assumes fixed temperature and mobilities and omits diffusion from density gradients.
An original dimensionless example isolates the effect of carrier injection. Suppose initially and . Adding equal excess populations gives , even though the added electron holes remain a minority carrier population. A semiconductor can respond strongly to a small injected population without changing its underlying band gap.
Semiconductor carrier freeze-out Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-10-20
At sufficiently low temperature, thermal ionization of shallow dopants becomes inefficient, reducing the mobile carrier density. An acceptor-doped sample may then have many neutral acceptors and few mobile electron holes. Extracting an activation energy requires a model of dopant ionization and compensation; the mobile density need not have the same simple activation exponent in every compensation regime.
Semiconductor doping 2026-10-18
The controlled introduction of impurities to change a semiconductor's charge carrier populations. Donor impurities and acceptor impurities can produce an n-type semiconductor or a p-type semiconductor, respectively; compensation and temperature also matter.
Semiconductor transport evidence for localization Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Nevill Francis Mott's 1977 lecture discusses silicon deposited in a glow discharge. Injected electrons provided a drift-mobility readout; electrical conductivity and temperature dependence tested localized-state transport and excitation toward a mobility edge. Varying temperature distinguishes transport regimes. The lecture gives no contact geometry or timing circuit here, so none is inferred. Its Figure 2 is schematic, not measured data.[ref]
This evidence motivates a transport question beyond the closed-chain eigenvalue problem: how does a prepared charge disturbance move under the conditions of a real sample? The numerical figures above supply neither drift-mobility measurements nor a model of the deposition process. Finite-size concentration alone cannot reproduce an experimental electrical conductivity curve.
Finite temperature permits phonon-assisted hopping between localized eigenstates or thermal excitation toward a mobility edge; localized states therefore need not imply zero measured electrical conductivity at every nonzero temperature.[ref]
Real dephasing destroys the relative wave phases needed for long-path interference. Observing coherent confinement requires the distance over which those wave phases survive to be long enough to explore the localized region, and the sample to be large enough to resolve it. Temperature alone is not an automatic switch: the actual inelastic processes set the relevant scales. Static elastic wave scattering preserves coherence within each realization. Loss of the ensemble-averaged coherent field through random wave phases is therefore not, by itself, physical dephasing of an individual sample.
Sensible heat Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
Sensible heat is transferred heat associated with a temperature change within a single thermodynamic phase. By contrast, latent heat can change the phase fraction while the temperature stays fixed during equilibrium phase coexistence. Neither name denotes an additional stored substance: both describe how transferred heat participates in a process.
For fixed mass and composition, use the heat capacity appropriate to the heating constraint. Under the quasistatic process assumptions in heat capacity, with only pressure-volume work and unchanged bulk kinetic energy and potential energy, fixed-pressure heating gives
Here is specific heat capacity at constant pressure; fixed-volume heating instead uses specific heat capacity at constant volume . A cooling step has negative with the sign convention in heat. A temperature difference has the same numerical value in units of the kelvin or degree Celsius. The integral follows by adding the small transfers , rather than assuming a constant heat capacity.
As a stylized ice-to-water example for a fixed-composition closed system at fixed pressure , take , an initial temperature of , melting at , and a final temperature of . Assume constant specific heat capacity at constant pressure values and , and latent heat of fusion . These are stipulated, rounded model values; ignore the container and heat losses, retain all the material, and assume only pressure-volume work under the quasistatic process conditions above. The three steps are
Only the first and third terms are sensible heat; the middle term is latent heat. The plateau begins after and ends after of total supplied heat. At total input, half the mass is liquid water and the temperature remains . The equilibrium phase transition temperature depends on pressure; this example stipulates a single fixed pressure. [ref]
Figure 1.
Heating of ice to water: sensible heat and latent heat
. Illustrative fixed-pressure heating curve using the constant parameters above. The sloping portions raise temperature; the long plateau changes the phase fraction. Total supplied heat is measured from the initial ice state and equals the enthalpy change under the stated assumptions. Details.
This split makes heating budgets easy to interpret: melting consumes of the supplied heat in this model despite causing no temperature rise. Within either single thermodynamic phase, the heating curve slope is ; a larger heat capacity makes the slope shallower. A flat interval represents changing phase fraction, so it cannot be modeled by applying across the phase transition. The complementary constructed example in latent heat tracks that phase fraction explicitly.
Sensor bias 2026-10-14
A sensor bias is a systematic offset between the measured output and the physical plant output, modeled here as with constant . Unlike zero-mean measurement noise, a sensor bias persists when repeated readouts are averaged. A sensor bias affects the physical meaning of a zero tracking error; for a temperature readout, independent thermometer calibration can detect it.
Separable differential equation Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-10-14
A first-order ordinary differential equation is separable if its explicit form factors as . On an interval where , write and take antiderivatives to obtain an implicit solution:
An initial condition determines and selects a branch and domain. The useful simplification is that the two integrals each involve only one variable, even when the original equation is nonlinear.
For Newton's law of cooling, division by gives . To keep the logarithm dimensionless, integrate relative to the initial excess temperature:
When , continuity preserves the sign of the excess temperature until any potential zero, giving . This formula never reaches zero at finite time. Taking its derivative verifies the ordinary differential equation, and substitution at verifies the initial condition.
Always check what division removed. Each zero gives a constant solution of a differential equation . Cooling therefore also has the equilibrium point , omitted by division but included in the final explicit formula. For the nonunique initial value problem , division by only describes the moving pieces: a valid solution may remain zero for an arbitrary time before joining one. Separation is a method for finding solutions, not a uniqueness theorem.
Separately conserved visible and dark entropy Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-14
After thermal decoupling in cosmology, two homogeneous sectors that evolve adiabatically without entropy injection satisfy and , hence their entropy density ratio is fixed. At a common relativistic temperature before decoupling, . Internal annihilations can change each sector's temperature and effective entropy degrees of freedom without changing its total comoving entropy.
Equivalent chemical bonds in an intact molecule need not have equal successive bond-dissociation enthalpies. Once one chemical bond is removed, the next reactant has a different electronic quantum state and may relax to a different molecular geometry. The successive steps compare different species. This distinction also explains why a tabulated average chemical bond strength is not necessarily the cost of the first cleavage.[ref]
For an invented species , stipulate the following gas-phase steps, with all enthalpies at the same temperature and the same standard states:
The symbols stand for hypothetical species with consistently chosen electronic states. They are not values for water or another measured molecule. By Hess's law, the total enthalpy of atomization for is ; the arithmetic mean per broken chemical bond is . Neither individual step equals that mean. Nor must the second step be cheaper: here it is deliberately more expensive. An exact sequence sums exactly; substituting averages taken from other molecules generally gives only an estimate.
Figure 1.
Two stipulated examples: changing the energy convention for one dissociation, and changing the reactant during sequential cleavage
. Left: , , and the model bond-dissociation enthalpy at . Right: cumulative enthalpy levels for two successive steps, with costs and and mean . The panels are separate hypothetical systems; neither contains molecular measurements. Details.
Shear-wave velocity 2026-10-25
The propagation speed of a shear elastic wave. In an ideal isotropic elastic medium it is , where is shear modulus and mass density. Seismic anisotropy, frequency-dependent relaxation and melt can complicate the inference from an observed shear-wave velocity to temperature or composition.
Shock cooling length 2026-10-20
The distance a downstream fluid element travels while losing a substantial fraction of its thermal energy. Multiplying the immediate downstream velocity by a radiative gas cooling time gives an order-of-magnitude length. A resolved layer instead uses , because mass density, temperature and speed change during cooling. It is distinct from the microscopic dissipative thickness of the shock wave.
Shockley diode equation 2026-10-18
For a p-n junction at fixed temperature, the Shockley diode equation models its electric current as
Here is the diode saturation current, the diode ideality factor, the thermal voltage, the Boltzmann constant, and the elementary charge.[ref]
For an original model example, choose , , and . Using and gives . Then gives , whereas gives . These are predictions of the declared model. There is no universal turn-on electric potential difference: solving the Shockley diode equation for the value needed at a chosen electric current gives
At , increasing by multiplies the electric current by approximately . At the same model gives . Its reverse branch approaches ; it cannot describe diode reverse breakdown.
A constructed extension adds internal series electrical resistance to a junction whose electric potential difference is . Applying the Kirchhoff cycle law gives
For and the same , sustaining needs : across the junction plus across its internal electrical resistance. The derivative
shows why the current-voltage characteristic becomes nearly a straight line when the internal series electrical resistance dominates. This is still a fixed-temperature model; self-heating can change , and . Real diodes also have leakage and charge-storage effects omitted here.[ref]