Axion
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A hypothetical subatomic particle postulated to resolve certain symmetry problems concerning the strong nuclear force.
"2000 Summer/Fall, John Clarke, Superconductivity: A Macroscopic Quantum Phenomenon, Rene Donaldson, Bill Kirk (editors), Beam Line, Volume 30, Number 2, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, page 47, The axion is a candidate particle for the cold dark matter that constitutes a large fraction of the mass of the Universe."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"2000 Summer/Fall, John Clarke, Superconductivity: A Macroscopic Quantum Phenomenon, Rene Donaldson, Bill Kirk (editors), Beam Line, Volume 30, Number 2, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, page 47, The axion is a candidate particle for the cold dark matter that constitutes a large fraction of the mass of the Universe."
Etymology
Coined by American physicist Frank Wilczek in 1978 after Axion, a brand of laundry detergent, for its -on suffix and the notion that the new particle could "clean up" a problem in physics or a learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ἄξιον (áxion). Compare with Ancient Greek ἄξων (áxōn, “axle”) and Sanskrit अक्ष (akṣa, “axle, axis, balance beam”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.