How to Use ground state in a Sentence

ground state

noun
  • From the ground state, the atom can go to the dark state or the bright state.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 5 June 2019
  • As the compound decays back to a ground state, light is emitted.
    — Discover Magazine, 17 Oct. 2016
  • To relax back to the ground state, the electron has to lose energy.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 17 July 2019
  • The result is that, on average, the atom is never quite in the ground state.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 10 Sep. 2018
  • There are two states that are almost at the same energy, called the ground state and the storage state.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 9 Nov. 2018
  • This happened despite the fact that the Bob atom always started out in its ground state.
    — Tara C. Smith, Quanta Magazine, 23 Feb. 2023
  • To prove that this ground state could indeed support efficient lasing, the team added a laser dye.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 29 Mar. 2026
  • The fact that the ground state of the system was uniquely specified by that energy took care of the rest.
    — Spyridon Michalakis, Scientific American, 1 Aug. 2020
  • In essence, the symmetry of the interaction is broken by the ground state.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 30 Mar. 2020
  • Did that splitting bring the universe to its final, lowest-energy ground state?
    — Paul M. Sutter, Discover Magazine, 16 Dec. 2022
  • The state and energy are read out and used to contrive a new guess for the ground state configuration.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 14 Sep. 2017
  • The idea is to gradually approach the molecule’s true ground state.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 14 Mar. 2026
  • Once trapped, the ions are reduced to a ground state through lasers, similar to what freezing them at absolute zero achieves.
    — Aldo Svaldi, Mercury News, 19 May 2026
  • Once trapped, the ions are reduced to a ground state through lasers, similar to what freezing them at absolute zero achieves.
    — Aldo Svaldi, Denver Post, 18 May 2026
  • To be a time crystal, an object must exhibit perpetual motion in its ground state.
    — Quanta Magazine, 25 Apr. 2013
  • This kept the excited structure from relaxing back down to a ground state without emitting photons.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 10 Sep. 2017
  • Aspelmeyer’s team has only forced the bead into its motional ground state along one dimension, not all three.
    — Sophia Chen, Wired, 30 Jan. 2020
  • The system can reach this second state from the ground state by absorbing a photon of a different energy.
    — Philip Ball, WIRED, 9 June 2019
  • Kentucky is a stand-your-ground state, which allows deadly force when someone is violently attacked.
    — NBC News, 23 May 2020
  • Nearly 20% of residents in the battle ground state are young people, among the highest rates in the country.
    — Sarah Parvini, Los Angeles Times, 1 Nov. 2020
  • Once the system reached ground state, the team created a phonon, a minuscule unit of vibrating energy.
    — Andrew Moseman, Discover Magazine, 18 Mar. 2010
  • Wilczek wondered whether, through similar physics, a system could have a ground state that repeated in some measurable way in time instead of in space.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 27 Nov. 2019
  • And the process could be repeated until the geometry dictated a large set of constraints on the system's ground state.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 16 Feb. 2023
  • Since isomers are present in stars, nuclear reactions are different than if a material were in its ground state.
    — Artemis Spyrou, The Conversation, 24 May 2022
  • An array of lasers is used to cool the ion to its quantum ground state, where the momentum and position uncertainties of the ion are at their minimum.
    — Anil Ananthaswamy, Scientific American, 21 Oct. 2021
  • The arrangement of protons and neutrons that results in the lowest energy is the most stable material and is called ground state.
    — Artemis Spyrou, The Conversation, 24 May 2022
  • When these excited atoms eventually return to their normal ground state, the excess energy from the collision shoots off in the form of vibrant light.
    — Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 30 Mar. 2023
  • In Aspelmeyer’s experiment, the particle was in its ground state 70% of the time on average.
    — Quanta Magazine, 18 Aug. 2021
  • In these cases, having the spin glass find its ground state is the mathematical equivalent of finding the optimal solution to a problem.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 19 Apr. 2023
  • As the number of particles increases, the overlap between the prepared input state and the true ground state shrinks exponentially.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 14 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ground state.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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