ForceIn physics, a force is an influence that can cause an object to change its velocity, i.e., to accelerate, unless counterbalanced by other forces. The concept of force makes the everyday notion of pushing or pulling mathematically precise. Because the magnitude and direction of a force are both important, force is a vector quantity. It is measured in the SI unit of newton (N) and often represented by the symbol F.
Topological defectTopological defects or solitons are irregularities or disruptions that occur within continuous fields or ordered states of matter. These defects, which can take various forms such as points, lines, or surfaces, are characterized by their stability and the fact that they cannot be 'smoothed out' or removed through continuous transformations of the field or material. They play a significant role in various areas of physics, including condensed matter physics, cosmology, and quantum field theory, and can have profound effects on the properties and behavior of the systems in which they occur.
Body forceIn physics, a body force is a force that acts throughout the volume of a body. Forces due to gravity, electric fields and magnetic fields are examples of body forces. Body forces contrast with contact forces or surface forces which are exerted to the surface of an object. Normal forces and shear forces between objects are surface forces as they are exerted to the surface of an object. All cohesive surface attraction and contact forces between objects are also considered as surface forces.
Self-assemblySelf-assembly is a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction. When the constitutive components are molecules, the process is termed molecular self-assembly. Self-assembly can be classified as either static or dynamic. In static self-assembly, the ordered state forms as a system approaches equilibrium, reducing its free energy.
CrystalliteA crystallite is a small or even microscopic crystal which forms, for example, during the cooling of many materials. Crystallites are also referred to as grains. Bacillite is a type of crystallite. It is rodlike with parallel longulites. The orientation of crystallites can be random with no preferred direction, called random texture, or directed, possibly due to growth and processing conditions.
Euler's rotation theoremIn geometry, Euler's rotation theorem states that, in three-dimensional space, any displacement of a rigid body such that a point on the rigid body remains fixed, is equivalent to a single rotation about some axis that runs through the fixed point. It also means that the composition of two rotations is also a rotation. Therefore the set of rotations has a group structure, known as a rotation group. The theorem is named after Leonhard Euler, who proved it in 1775 by means of spherical geometry.
Plasticity (physics)In physics and materials science, plasticity (also known as plastic deformation) is the ability of a solid material to undergo permanent deformation, a non-reversible change of shape in response to applied forces. For example, a solid piece of metal being bent or pounded into a new shape displays plasticity as permanent changes occur within the material itself. In engineering, the transition from elastic behavior to plastic behavior is known as yielding. Plastic deformation is observed in most materials, particularly metals, soils, rocks, concrete, and foams.
Crystallographic databaseA crystallographic database is a database specifically designed to store information about the structure of molecules and crystals. Crystals are solids having, in all three dimensions of space, a regularly repeating arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules. They are characterized by symmetry, morphology, and directionally dependent physical properties. A crystal structure describes the arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules in a crystal.
Rotation matrixIn linear algebra, a rotation matrix is a transformation matrix that is used to perform a rotation in Euclidean space. For example, using the convention below, the matrix rotates points in the xy plane counterclockwise through an angle θ about the origin of a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system. To perform the rotation on a plane point with standard coordinates v = (x, y), it should be written as a column vector, and multiplied by the matrix R: If x and y are the endpoint coordinates of a vector, where x is cosine and y is sine, then the above equations become the trigonometric summation angle formulae.
Rodrigues' rotation formulaIn the theory of three-dimensional rotation, Rodrigues' rotation formula, named after Olinde Rodrigues, is an efficient algorithm for rotating a vector in space, given an axis and angle of rotation. By extension, this can be used to transform all three basis vectors to compute a rotation matrix in SO(3), the group of all rotation matrices, from an axis–angle representation. In other words, the Rodrigues' formula provides an algorithm to compute the exponential map from so(3), the Lie algebra of SO(3), to SO(3) without actually computing the full matrix exponential.
