molecular beam

American  

noun

Physics.

1. a stream of molecules freed from a substance, usually a salt, by evaporation and then passed through a narrow slit for focusing, for investigating the properties of nuclei, atoms, and molecules.

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molecular beam British  

noun

1. physics a parallel beam of molecules that are at low pressure and suffer no interatomic or intermolecular collisions

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

molecular beam

To examine the material's properties, the researchers used molecular beam epitaxy together with low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, allowing them to probe its electronic behavior with atomic level precision.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 11, 2026

"Rather than ion implantation, molecular beam epitaxy was used to precisely incorporate gallium atoms into the germanium's crystal lattice," says Julian Steele, a physicist at the University of Queensland and a co-author of the study.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 30, 2025

To simulate these peculiar conditions, California scientists use a peculiar apparatus: a "molecular beam" developed by Physicist Franklin C. Hurlbut.

From Time Magazine Archive

In the late 1950s Herschbach proposed to study what happens to individual molecules in the trillionth of a second of a chemical reaction by using the crossed molecular beam technique.

From Time Magazine Archive

The pale glow of the molecular beam reached out its ghostly finger and touched the heavy-walled ray projector building.

From Islands of Space by Campbell, John Wood