Unit system metric Symbol fm | Unit of length 1 fm in ... ... is equal to ... | |
SI units 6985100000000000000♠1×10 m Natural units 7019618770000000000♠6.1877×10 ℓP
6995188970000000000♠1.8897×10 a0 | ||
The femtometre (American spelling femtometer, symbol fm derived from the Danish and Norwegian word femten, "fifteen"+Ancient Greek: μέτρον, metrοn, "unit of measurement") is an SI unit of length equal to 10−15 metres. This distance can also be called a fermi and was so named in honour of physicist Enrico Fermi, as it is a typical length-scale of nuclear physics.
Contents
Definition and equivalents
1000 attometres = 1 femtometre = 1 fermi = 0.001 picometre = 6985100000000000000♠1×10−15 metres
7006100000000000000♠1000000 femtometres = 10 ångström = 1 nanometre.
For example, the charge radius of a proton is approximately 0.84–0.87 femtometres while the radius of a gold nucleus is approximately 8.45 femtometres.
1 barn = 100 fm2
History
The femtometre was adopted by the 11th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, and added to SI in 1964.
The fermi is named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), one of the founders of nuclear physics. The term was coined by Robert Hofstadter in a 1956 paper published in Reviews of Modern Physics entitled "Electron Scattering and Nuclear Structure". The term is widely used by nuclear and particle physicists. When Hofstadter was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics, it subsequently appears in the text of his 1961 Nobel Lecture, "The electron-scattering method and its application to the structure of nuclei and nucleons" (December 11, 1961).