virtual particle


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virtual particle

n.
A subatomic particle that is allowed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to exist for a short period of time, but whose continued existence would violate the principle of conservation of energy.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
Particles (together with their corresponding antiparticles, in pairs) can be created out of the vacuum by putting the right amount of energy into the vacuum, thereby giving a virtual particle (-antiparticle pair) enough energy to emerge from the vacuum; similarly, particles (together with their corresponding antiparticles, in pairs) can go back into the vacuum, emitting the excess energy.
As such, existence and nonexistence might function as an undivided whole, sustaining virtual particle production and annihilation--within a field of infinite possibilities and potentials, united by point-centered-processes.
Each virtual particle within the Evogrids simulated liquid soup will have particular physical properties, and will behave accordingly.
Today, the vacuum is seen as a chaotic sea of boundless energy (energy density equivalent to ~ [10.sup.94] grams per cc) with incredibly large destructive interference of virtual particle wave functions.
When physicists try to somehow make sense of this, they'll say that the particles that emerge, that didn't exist before, are virtual particles. What's a virtual particle?
Nor does the comparison of the universe's origin to the spontaneous production of a virtual particle serve to render these models plausibly realistic.
These equations provide analytic expressions for the non-perturbative calculation of quantum self energies and interaction energies, and eliminate the need for the virtual particle interpretation.
"Virtual particle pairs are constantly being created near the horizon of the black hole, as they are everywhere.  Normally, they are created as a particle-antiparticle pair and they quickly annihilate each other.  But near the horizon of a black hole, it's possible for one to fall in before the annihilation can happen, in which case the other one escapes as Hawking radiation."
where [DELTA]E is the energy gained by the virtual particle during the time interval [DELTA]t, that is equivalent to the mass/energy of the real particle that would exchange with it, and h is the Planck constant.
At least one of the involved Z bosons then behaves as a virtual particle. In this connection is also observed that the magnitude of the Higgs-like boson mass has not been predicted through the theory by Higgs [9].
Furthermore, let [m.sub.0] be the resultant mass of S, considered as the mass of a virtual particle located at the center of mass of S, and let [v.sub.0] be the Newtonian velocity relative to [[summation].sub.0] of the Newtonian CM frame of S.

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