All articles starting with W

Wave propagation in anisotropic media

Wave propagation in anisotropic media describes how waves travel in crystals whose properties vary with direction, giving two or three distinct wave speeds and birefringence.

Wave radar

Wave radar is a radar-based remote sensing method that measures the directional ocean wave spectrum without placing an instrument in the water, using X-band nautical radar or high-frequency ground-wave radar.

Wave runup

Wave runup is the maximum vertical elevation reached by wave uprush above still-water level on a beach or coastal structure, made up of wave setup and swash.

Wave setup

Wave setup is the rise in mean sea level at the coast caused by breaking waves, adding to tide and storm surge inside the surf zone.

Wave spectrum

A wave spectrum is the statistical distribution of ocean wave energy across wave frequencies and directions, distinguishing wind waves from swell and underpinning operational wave forecasting models.

Wave Star

Wave Star (Wavestar) is a Danish wave energy converter in which a row of floats drives a hydraulic generator, conceived by Niels and Keld Hansen in 2000.

Sep 19, 2026

Wave to Earth

Wave to Earth (웨이브투어스) is a three-piece South Korean indie rock band from Seoul, formed in 2019, best known for the viral 2020 song "seasons" and over a billion streams.

Wave turbulence

Wave turbulence is the statistical mechanics of random, weakly nonlinear waves whose interactions redistribute energy across scales, studied in ocean waves, plasmas, superfluids, and optics.

Wave variables

Wave variables are paired signals combining force and velocity so a communication channel stays passive for any time delay, the standard tool for stabilizing force-reflecting bilateral teleoperation.

Wave vector

A wave vector, also called the propagation vector, is a vector pointing in a wave's direction of propagation with magnitude equal to the wavenumber 2π/λ.

Oct 21, 2026

Wave-ESD trial

Wave-ESD (NCT07040020) is a randomized single-center trial at Istituto Clinico Humanitas, Italy, comparing underwater ESD with conventional CO2 ESD for large (>20 mm) nonpedunculated colorectal polyps; 122 participants, primary outcome R0 resection.

Wave-Gotik-Treffen

The Wave-Gotik-Treffen (WGT) is the world's largest gothic/black-scene festival, held each Pentecost weekend since 1992 at about 50 venues across Leipzig, drawing roughly 20,000 visitors and including the Victorian Picnic and medieval markets.

Wave-making resistance

Wave-making resistance is the part of a ship's total resistance caused by the gravity-wave pattern the hull generates and carries, which absorbs energy from the hull, appearing as drag.

Wave–particle duality

Wave–particle duality, also called wave-particle complementarity, is the quantum-mechanical principle that every quantum object, such as a photon or electron, shows wave-like behavior in some experiments and particle-like behavior in others.

Wave–particle duality relation

The wave–particle duality relation, also known as the Englert–Greenberger duality, is a quantum mechanics inequality, D² + V² ≤ 1, quantifying Bohr's complementarity principle by limiting which-way information and interference visibility jointly.

Wave–particle interactions (plasma physics)

Wave–particle interactions are the resonant exchange of energy and momentum between plasma waves and charged particles, which Landau showed in 1946 damps waves even without collisions, and which drives heating and scattering in space plasmas.

Wave–wave interaction

A wave–wave interaction is a nonlinear process in which two or more waves in a medium exchange energy and momentum, most commonly through resonant three-wave coupling in plasmas.

Wavefield reconstruction

Wavefield reconstruction is a geophysical method that recovers a complete seismic or acoustic wavefield from sparse, irregularly sampled data, a prerequisite for full waveform inversion and least-squares migration.

Wavefield separation

Wavefield separation is a signal-processing method in seismology that decomposes recorded seismic data into components such as upgoing and downgoing waves or P- and S-waves, feeding migration and full-waveform inversion.

Waveform

A waveform is the pattern of oscillating pressure produced by a sound, graphed as amplitude against time or distance and described by frequency, amplitude, and phase.

Waveform tomography

Waveform tomography, known as full waveform inversion (FWI), is an iterative seismic method that estimates subsurface velocity structure by minimizing the difference between recorded and synthetic waveforms.

Wavefront

A wavefront is a surface over which a wave's oscillation has a constant phase, spherical from a point source and effectively plane far away, central to Huygens's construction.

Wavefront .obj file

Wavefront .obj (OBJ) is an open, plain-text file format for storing 3D surface geometry, developed by Wavefront Technologies around 1990 and since adopted across most 3D graphics and CAD applications.

Wavefront reconstruction

Wavefront reconstruction is the computational step of an adaptive optics system that estimates a light wavefront's phase distortions from wavefront-sensor measurements, converting them into a phase map or deformable-mirror commands.

Wavefront sensing

Wavefront sensing measures the distortions, or aberrations, in an optical wavefront, most prominently the atmospheric turbulence affecting starlight at ground-based telescopes, and supplies the signals that drive adaptive optics deformable mirrors.

Wavefront shaping

Wavefront shaping is a set of optical techniques that refocus light through scattering media like tissue by optimizing the input wavefront, pioneered by Vellekoop and Mosk in 2007.

WaveGlow

WaveGlow is a flow-based generative neural network, proposed by NVIDIA researchers in an October 2018 arXiv paper, that converts mel-spectrograms into speech audio as a text-to-speech vocoder.

WaveGrad

WaveGrad is a diffusion-based generative model for raw audio waveform generation, introduced by Google Brain researchers in a September 2020 paper and published at ICLR 2021.

Waveguide

A waveguide is a structure that confines and directs waves; in microwave engineering it is a hollow metal pipe carrying radio-frequency power between a transmitter and an antenna.