From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishperturbationper‧tur‧ba‧tion /ˌpɜːtəˈbeɪʃən $ ˌpɜːrtər-/ noun 1 [countable, uncountable] technical a small change in the movement, quality, or behaviour of something climatic perturbations2 [uncountable] formal worry about something that has happened or will happen
Examples from the Corpus
perturbation• In the strong field case the inter-electronic effects are treated as a perturbation.• These asteroids may then be disturbed by gravitational perturbations by Jupiter into eccentric orbits, and then evolve into Earth-crossing orbits.• Extensive, massive deletion of this kind would necessarily cause major perturbations to cellular function and energetic equilibrium.• Similarly, major trends could be lost because of focusing on minor perturbations, or vice versa.• But Atkins's introduction and chapters on operators, perturbation theory and group theory are enjoyable.• Simulated annealing uses random perturbations to shake the parameter values out of a local optimum so that globally optimal values may be found.• I am also happy to say that the perturbation maneuver has been successfully completed.• Although the atmosphere was stable overall, it was sensitive to perturbations which caused it to vacillate easily. 