Femtometre
Unit of length
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Related on Lably
Through Length, International System of Units and Metre
Definition and equivalents
1000000 zeptometres = 1 femtometre = 1 fermi = 0.000001 nanometre = 10−15 metres
1000000000000 femtometres = 1 millimetre.
For example, the charge radius of a proton is approximately 0.841 femtometres while the radius of a gold nucleus is approximately 8.45 femtometres.
1 barn = 100 fm2
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History
The femtometre was adopted by the 11th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, and added to the SI in 1964, using the Danish word for "15" and the similarity in spelling with fermi.
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 appeared 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).