Mode
Acoustics
A room resonance. Axial modes are associated with pairs of parallel walls. Tangential modes involve four room surfaces and oblique modes all six surfaces.
Mathematics
The most frequently occurring value in a sequence of numbers.
A data set has no mode when all the numbers appear in the data with the same frequency. A data set has multiple modes when two or more values appear with the same frequency.
Optics
A term used to describe how the power of a laser beam is geometrically distributed across the cross-section of the beam. Also used to describe the operating mode of a laser such as continuous or pulsed laser.
See also: Multimodal Distribution, Real Modes.
Subjects: Statistics