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This is a list of well-known dimensionless quantities illustrating their variety of forms and applications. The tables also include pure numbers, dimensionless ratios, or dimensionless physical constants; these topics are discussed in the article.
Dimensionless quantities, or quantities of dimension one, [1] are quantities implicitly defined in a manner that prevents their aggregation into units of measurement. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Typically expressed as ratios that align with another system, these quantities do not necessitate explicitly defined units .
The original Standard Model of particle physics from the 1970s contained 19 fundamental dimensionless constants describing the masses of the particles and the strengths of the electroweak and strong forces. In the 1990s, neutrinos were discovered to have nonzero mass, and a quantity called the vacuum angle was found to be indistinguishable from ...
Physics relies on dimensionless numbers like the Reynolds number in fluid dynamics, [7] the fine-structure constant in quantum mechanics, [8] and the Lorentz factor in relativity. [9] In chemistry , state properties and ratios such as mole fractions concentration ratios are dimensionless.
For example, if "x" represented mass, the letter "m" might be an appropriate symbol to represent the dimensionless mass quantity. In this article, the following conventions have been used: t – represents the independent variable – usually a time quantity.
These include the Boltzmann constant, which gives the correspondence of the dimension temperature to the dimension of energy per degree of freedom, and the Avogadro constant, which gives the correspondence of the dimension of amount of substance with the dimension of count of entities (the latter formally regarded in the SI as being dimensionless).
A quantity of dimension one is historically known as a dimensionless quantity (a term that is still commonly used); all its dimensional exponents are zero and its dimension symbol is . Such a quantity can be regarded as a derived quantity in the form of the ratio of two quantities of the same dimension.
Derived quantity Symbol Description SI derived unit Dimension Comments Absement: A: Measure of sustained displacement: the first integral with respect to time of displacement m⋅s L T: vector Acceleration: a →: Rate of change of velocity per unit time: the second time derivative of position m/s 2: L T −2: vector Angular acceleration: ω a