Definition of singlet in English:

noun

• 1British A sleeveless garment worn under or instead of a shirt; a vest.

  Example sentences

  • ‘Tommy is wearing a baseball cap, a singlet and combat shorts, revealing several tattoos.’
  • ‘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.’
  • ‘Alas, after a while, the sight of board shorts, singlets, jandals and sunglasses will make you wince.’
  • ‘Equally as beautiful as his womenswear, this featured plain white singlets studded with gold sequins, low-slung cream trousers and kimono print shirts.’
  • ‘Others had on only singlets and cotton trousers as they jumped into the water.’

• 2Physics
  A single unresolvable line in a spectrum, not part of a multiplet.

  Example sentences

  • ‘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.’
  • ‘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.’

  1. 2.1 A state or energy level with zero spin, giving a single value for a particular quantum number.
     Example sentences

     • ‘A small singlet-triplet energy gap is known to favor intersystem crossing.’
     • ‘Energy can be transferred from the singlet state to the triplet state via intersystem crossing.’
     • ‘The reorganizational energy of the singlet ET was also calculated from the temperature-dependent data and found to be 0.89 eV.’
     • ‘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.’
     • ‘Do aggregates of A2E have a higher singlet-oxygen quantum yield rather than monomers?’

• 3Chemistry
  An atomic or molecular state in which all electron spins are paired.

  as modifier ‘singlet oxygen’

  More example sentences

  • ‘And where does the singlet oxygen, the energy source, come from?’
  • ‘The origin of the initial spike observed upon detection of singlet oxygen luminescence remains unresolved.’
  • ‘It can thus be regarded as a simultaneous excitation of two triplets, whose coupling generates an overall singlet state.’
  • ‘The study of the excited states properties has shown that its photoreactivity in neutral aqueous medium is singlet initiated.’
  • ‘However, reactive oxygen species generated by UVA radiation, particularly singlet oxygen, can also damage nucleic acids.’