singlet
/ˈsɪŋɡlɪt
/noun
1chiefly British A sleeveless garment worn under or instead of a shirt; a vest.Equally as beautiful as his womenswear, this featured plain white singlets studded with gold sequins, low-slung cream trousers and kimono print shirts....
- Winter has settled in, you're not wearing a singlet under your business shirt and you have your first sneeze… she thinks you caught pneumonia and you're going to die.
- Others had on only singlets and cotton trousers as they jumped into the water.
2 Physics A single unresolvable line in a spectrum, not part of a multiplet.To break supersymmetry using the F-term, one can add chiral multiplets that transform as singlets under the gauge symmetries in the theory....
- Superimposing such a diffractive structure on an aspheric surface yields an achromatic singlet whose spherical and chromatic aberrations are corrected.
- The singlet is detectable as a quintet at room temperature in methemoglobin with identical spectral features to those of the well characterized tyrosyl radical in photosystem II.
2.1A state or energy level with zero spin, giving a single value for a particular quantum number.A small singlet-triplet energy gap is known to favor intersystem crossing....
- Its superconductivity is often assumed to be unconventional in that the Cooper pairs are not in a spin singlet state with s-wave symmetry, as with conventional superconductors.
- The reorganizational energy of the singlet ET was also calculated from the temperature-dependent data and found to be 0.89 eV.
3 Chemistry An atomic or molecular state in which all electron spins are paired: [as modifier]: singlet oxygen...
- However, reactive oxygen species generated by UVA radiation, particularly singlet oxygen, can also damage nucleic acids.
- The origin of the initial spike observed upon detection of singlet oxygen luminescence remains unresolved.
- The study of the excited states properties has shown that its photoreactivity in neutral aqueous medium is singlet initiated.
Origin
Mid 18th century (originally denoting a man's short jacket): from single (because the garment was unlined) + -et1, on the pattern of doublet.