Abstract
Ideograms (symbols that represent a word or idea) have great communicative value. They refer to concepts in a simple manner, easing the understanding of related ideas. Moreover, ideograms can simplify the often cumbersome notation used in the fields of Physics and physical Chemistry. Nonetheless only a few ideograms—like \(\hbar \) and Å—have been defined to date. In this work we propose that the scientific community follows the example of Mathematics—as well as that of oriental languages—and bestows a more important role upon ideograms. To support this thesis we propose ideograms for essential concepts in Physics and Chemistry. They are designed to be intuitive, and their goal is to make equations easier to read and understand. Our symbols are included in a publicly available 
package (svrsymbols).
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Notes
E.g. The General Conference on Weights and Measures: see www.bipm.org, www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/CGPM/CGPM25.pdf.
Variable \(\gamma \) is frequently a summation index which can represent a wide variety of variables; \(H^0\) may be misunderstood as a Hamiltonian; G can represent the gravity constant, among many other quantities whose names begin with a ‘G’.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Dr. Carl Christian K. Mikkelsen (University of Umeå, Sweden) for his help and advice and to Prof. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (University of Zaragoza) for her revision of the manuscript.
Author contributions P.G.R. proposed the idea of developing and using further ideograms and made by hand the corresponding designs; both N.V. and A.S. worked as graphical designers; A.S. wrote the 
package that includes the ghlyphs.
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Appendix: Table of Glyphs of the svrsymbols package
Appendix: Table of Glyphs of the svrsymbols package
The SVRsymbols font contains new ideograms for use in Science. It also contains a standard presentation for ideograms which are traditionally used in particle Physics (e.g. 
) but which have not previously been included in 
. We included them into the svrsymbols package so that there is a standard presentation that boosts the use of ideograms in Science. For some concepts there existed a sign but we propose an alternative ideogram to simplify the notation (
) or to avoid confusion (e.g. 
).Footnote 2
We suggest to gradually change the rest of characters used for particles (e.g. c, d, g) by specifically-devised ideograms. The novel symbols have been designed to be intuitive and easy to identify and to remember. The SVRsymbols package has no options and it provides an interface to the font. It defines commands for use in math mode. The commands and the resulting symbols are shown in the table below. The package can be downloaded from http://ctan.org/pkg/svrsymbols and freely used if the present letter is cited. The list of symbols currently appearing in the svrsymbols package with the corresponding 
commands is displayed in Table 6.
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García Risueño, P., Syropoulos, A. & Vergés, N. Ideograms for Physics and Chemistry. Found Phys 46, 1713–1721 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-016-0044-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-016-0044-5