Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Word of the day: geminate

The word of the day is geminate:

< Latin gemināt-us, past participle of gemināre to double, < geminus twin.
 A. adj.
Duplicated, combined in pairs, twin, binate.
geminate leaves, leaves springing in pairs from the same node, one leaf beside the other.  
B. n.
A doubled consonant. (OED)


But the meaning I was going for was geminate recombination: "This expression refers to the reaction, with each other, of two transient species produced from a common precursor in solution." (IUPAC)


"The calculations show that probability of formation of a photoproduct for absorption in the T1 state exceeds that for the S1 state about 40 times.  This may be due to a much higher probability of geminate recombination of cation-electron pairs Tyr+-(e- aq) produced in a singlet SN state as compared with pairs Tyr+-(e- aq) produced in a triplet TN state and to the difference between the absorption cross sections from S1 and T1 levels."

 - D.N. Nikogosyan et al., "Asymmetric photolysis of biomolecules under high-intensity UV laser irradiation", Chemical Physics 147:437 (1990).

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