From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishquantumquan‧tum /ˈkwɒntəm $ ˈkwɑːn-/ noun (plural quanta /-tə/) [countable] technical TPa unit of energy in nuclear physics
Examples from the Corpus
quantum• Actually, quantum descriptions are very precise, as we shall see, although radically different from the familiar classical ones.• Because string theory has so much symmetry, it can accommodate the disparate faces of nature displayed by gravity and quantum theory.• Of course, there is nothing intrinsically quantum mechanical in what has been said so far.• Finally there is quantum electrodynamics, which is the quantum field theory of light and charged particles.• But at the quantum level these terms give important interference effects.• The first derives from the quantum theory.• In the quantum theory of gravity, on the other hand, a third possibility arises.• Contemporary cosmology even suggests that the whole universe might have appeared out of the quantum vacuum: the ultimate free lunch.Origin quantum (1600-1700) Latin quantus; → QUANTITY 