How many nanoseconds are in a second?
Nanosecond
A nanosecond (ns) is an SI unit of time equal to one thousand-millionth of a second (or one billionth of a second), that is, / of a second, or 10 seconds.
Pulse-per-second signal
A pulse per second (PPS or 1PPS) is an electrical signal that has a width of less than one second and a sharply rising or abruptly falling edge that accurately repeats once per second. PPS signals are output by radio beacons, frequency standards, other types of precision oscillators and some GPS receivers. Precision clocks are sometimes manufactured by interfacing a PPS signal generator to processing equipment that aligns the PPS signal to the UTC second and converts it to a useful display. Atomic clocks usually have an external PPS output, although internally they may operate at 9,192,631,770 Hz. PPS signals have an accuracy ranging from a 12 picoseconds to a few microseconds per second, or 2.0 nanoseconds to a few milliseconds per day based on the resolution and accuracy of the device generating the signal.
Miles per hour
Nautical and aeronautical applications favour the knot as a common unit of speed. (One knot is one nautical mile per hour, with a nautical mile being exactly 1,852 meters or about 6,076 feet.)
Microsecond
A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10 or ) of a second. Its symbol is μs, sometimes simplified to us when Unicode is not available.
Attosecond
An attosecond is equal to 1000 zeptoseconds, or of a femtosecond. Because the next higher SI unit for time is the femtosecond (10 seconds), durations of 10 s and 10 s will typically be expressed as tens or hundreds of attoseconds:
Cycle per second
The cycle per second was a once-common English name for the unit of frequency now known as the hertz (Hz). The plural form was typically used, often written cycles per second, cycles/second, c.p.s., c/s, ~, or, ambiguously, just cycles. The term comes from the fact that sound waves have a frequency measurable in their number of oscillations, or "cycles", per second.
Sound object
8. "Subsample" Fluctuations on a time scale too brief to be properly recorded or perceived, measured in billionths of a second (nanoseconds) or less.
NanoSight
NanoSight Ltd is a company that designs and manufactures instruments for the scientific analysis of nanoparticles that are between approximately ten nanometers (nm) and one micron (μm) in diameter. The company was founded in 2003 by Bob Carr and John Knowles to further develop a technique Bob Carr had invented to visualize nanoparticles suspended in liquid. The company has since developed the technique of Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), and they produce a series of instruments to count, size and visualize nanoparticles in liquid suspension using this patented technology.
Second
Some common units of time in seconds are: a minute is 60 seconds; an hour is 3,600 seconds; a day is 86,400 seconds; a week is 604,800 seconds; a year (other than leap years) is 31,536,000 seconds; and a (Gregorian) century averages 3,155,695,200 seconds; with all of the above excluding any possible leap seconds.
List of humorous units of measurement
In nuclear physics, a "shake" is 10 nanoseconds, the approximate time for a generation within a nuclear chain reaction. The term comes from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", meaning quickly.
Degree (angle)
Alternatively, the traditional sexagesimal unit subdivisions can be used. One degree is divided into 60 "minutes (of arc)", and one minute into 60 "seconds (of arc)". Use of degrees-minutes-seconds is also called DMS notation. These subdivisions, also called the "arcminute" and "arcsecond", are respectively represented by a single and double prime. For example, , or, using quotation mark characters, . Additional precision can be provided using decimals for the arcseconds component.
Network Time Protocol
The 64-bit timestamps used by NTP consist of a 32-bit part for seconds and a 32-bit part for fractional second, giving a time scale that rolls over every 2 seconds (136 years) and a theoretical resolution of 2 seconds (233 picoseconds). NTP uses an epoch of January 1, 1900 so the first rollover will be on February 7, 2036.
Knot (unit)
Etymologically, the term derives from counting the number of knots in the line that unspooled from the reel of a chip log in a specific time. is the length of the internationally agreed nautical mile. The US adopted the international definition in 1954, having previously used the US nautical mile (). The UK adopted the international nautical mile definition in 1970, having previously used the UK Admiralty nautical mile ( or ).
The speeds of vessels relative to the fluids in which they travel (boat speeds and air speeds) are measured in knots. For consistency, the speeds of navigational fluids (tidal streams, river currents and wind speeds) are also measured in knots. Thus, speed over the ground (SOG) (ground speed (GS) in aircraft) and rate of progress towards a distant point ("velocity made good", VMG) are also given in knots.
Millisecond pulsar
A millisecond pulsar (MSP) is a pulsar with a rotational period in the range of about 1–10 milliseconds. Millisecond pulsars have been detected in the radio, X-ray, and gamma ray portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The leading theory for the origin of millisecond pulsars is that they are old, rapidly rotating neutron stars which have been spun up or "recycled" through accretion of matter from a companion star in a close binary system. For this reason, millisecond pulsars are sometimes called recycled pulsars.
Decimal time
The second is the International System of Units (SI) unit of time duration. It is also the standard single-unit time representation in many programming languages, most notably C, and part of UNIX/POSIX standards used by Linux, Mac OS X, etc.; to convert fractional days to fractional seconds, multiply the number by 86400. Fractional seconds are represented as milliseconds (ms), microseconds (μs) or nanoseconds (ns). Absolute times are usually represented relative to 1 January 1970, at midnight. Other systems may use a different zero point (like Unix time).
Picosecond
A picosecond is an SI unit of time equal to 10 or / (one trillionth) of a second. That is one trillionth, or one millionth of one millionth of a second, or 0.000 000 000 001 seconds. A picosecond is to one second as one second is to approximately 31,689 years. Multiple technical approaches achieve imaging within single-digit picoseconds: for example, the streak camera or intensified CCD (ICCD) cameras are able to picture the motion of light.
Second
Some common events in seconds are: a stone falls about 4.9 meters from rest in one second; a pendulum of length about one meter has a swing of one second, so pendulum clocks have pendulums about a meter long; the fastest human sprinters run 10 meters in a second; an ocean wave in deep water travels about 23 meters in one second; sound travels about 343 meters in one second in air; light takes 1.3 seconds to reach Earth from the surface of the Moon, a distance of 384,400 kilometers.
List of unusual units of measurement
The light-nanosecond was popularized as a unit of distance by Grace Hopper as the distance which a photon could travel in one billionth of a second (roughly 30 cm or one foot): "The speed of light is one foot per nanosecond." In her speaking engagements, she was well known for passing out light-nanoseconds of wire to the audience, and contrasting it with light-microseconds (a coil of wire 1,000 times as long) and light-picoseconds (the size of ground black pepper). Over the course of her life, she found many uses for this visual aid, including demonstrating the waste of sub-optimal programming, illustrating advances in computer speed, and simply giving young scientists and policy makers the ability to conceptualize the magnitude of very large and small numbers.
Second
The second is the SI base unit of time, commonly understood and historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each. Mechanical and electric clocks and watches usually have a face with 60 tickmarks representing seconds and minutes, traversed by a second hand and minute hand. Digital clocks and watches often have a two-digit counter that cycles through seconds. The second is also part of several other units of measurement like meters per second for velocity, meters per second per second for acceleration, and per second for frequency.
Flick (time)
A flick is a unit of time equivalent to exactly 1/705,600,000 of a second. The figure was chosen so that frequencies of 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100 and 120 Hz, as well as 1/1000 divisions of all those, can be represented with integers. The unit was launched in January 2018 by Facebook. A flick is approximately 1.42 × 10 s, which makes it larger than a nanosecond but much smaller than a microsecond.
Microsecond
A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10 and 10 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds.
Mathematical coincidence
The speed of light is (by definition) exactly 299,792,458 m/s, very close to 300,000,000 m/s. This is a pure coincidence, as the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the Earth's pole and equator along the surface at sea level, and the Earth's circumference just happens to be about 2/15 of a light-second. It is also roughly equal to one foot per nanosecond (the actual number is 0.9836 ft/ns).
Nanocircuitry
Nanocircuits are electrical circuits operating on the nanometer scale. This is well into the quantum realm, where quantum mechanical effects become very important. One nanometer is equal to 10 meters or a row of 10 hydrogen atoms. With such progressively smaller circuits, more can be fitted on a computer chip. This allows faster and more complex functions using less power. Nanocircuits are composed of three different fundamental components. These are transistors, interconnections, and architecture, all fabricated on the nanometer scale.
List of unusual units of measurement
In nuclear engineering and astrophysics contexts, the shake is sometimes used as a conveniently short period of time. 1 shake is defined as 10 nanoseconds.
Gravitational wave
Compact stars like white dwarfs and neutron stars can be constituents of binaries. For example, a pair of solar mass neutron stars in a circular orbit at a separation of 1.89 m (189,000 km) has an orbital period of 1,000 seconds, and an expected lifetime of 1.30 seconds or about 414,000 years. Such a system could be observed by LISA if it were not too far away. A far greater number of white dwarf binaries exist with orbital periods in this range. White dwarf binaries have masses in the order of the Sun, and diameters in the order of the Earth. They cannot get much closer together than 10,000 km before they will merge and explode in a supernova which would also end the emission of gravitational waves. Until then, their gravitational radiation would be comparable to that of a neutron star binary.
When the orbit of a neutron star binary has decayed to 1.89 m (1890 km), its remaining lifetime is about 130,000 seconds or 36 hours. The orbital frequency will vary from 1 orbit per second at the start, to 918 orbits per second when the orbit has shrunk to 20 km at merger. The majority of gravitational radiation emitted will be at twice the orbital frequency. Just before merger, the inspiral could be observed by LIGO if such a binary were close enough. LIGO has only a few minutes to observe this merger out of a total orbital lifetime that may have been billions of years. ln August 2017, LIGO and Virgo observed the first binary neutron star inspiral in GW170817, and 70 observatories collaborated to detect the electromagnetic counterpart, a kilonova in the galaxy NGC 4993, 40 megaparsecs away, emitting a short gamma ray burst (GRB 170817A) seconds after the merger, followed by a longer optical transient (AT 2017gfo) powered by r-process nuclei. Advanced LIGO detector should be able to detect such events up to 200 megaparsecs away. Within this range of the order 40 events are expected per year.
Joule
A watt second (also watt-second, symbol W s or W·s) is a derived unit of energy equivalent to the joule. The watt-second is the energy equivalent to the power of one watt sustained for one second. While the watt-second is equivalent to the joule in both units and meaning, there are some contexts in which the term "watt-second" is used instead of "joule".
Metric system
The metre, ampere, candela, and mole are all defined in terms of other base units. For example, the speed of light is defined as 299,792,458 metres per second, and the metre is derived from that constant and the definition of a second. As a result, in dimensional analysis, they remain wholly separate concepts.
Minute and second of arc
The standard symbol for the arcsecond is the double prime (″) (U+2033), though a double quote (") (U+0022) is commonly used where only ASCII characters are permitted. One arcsecond is thus written 1″. It is also abbreviated as arcsec or asec.
Metre per second
1 kilometre per second is equivalent to:
Second
Multiples of seconds are usually counted in hours and minutes. Fractions of a second are usually counted in tenths or hundredths. In scientific work, small fractions of a second are counted in milliseconds (thousandths), microseconds (millionths), nanoseconds (billionths), and sometimes smaller units of a second.
An everyday experience with small fractions of a second is a 1-gigahertz microprocessor which has a cycle time of 1 nanosecond. Camera shutter speeds usually range from second to second.
Superlens
A joint research team, working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has discovered a method of using nanoparticles to illuminate the cellular interior to reveal these slow processes. Nanoparticles, thousands of times smaller than a cell, have a variety of applications. One type of nanoparticle called a quantum dot glows when exposed to light. These semiconductor particles can be coated with organic materials, which are tailored to be attracted to specific proteins within the part of a cell a scientist wishes to examine.
Nanocar race
The track of the first competition is a gold surface, equipped with grooves to define race lanes in order to avoid losing vehicles. It is about 100 nanometres long, and includes two bends. It is located in a small enclosure cooled to -269°C under a primary vacuum of 10 mbar and is observed simultaneously by four scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) miniaturized for this event and operating on the same surface. Each microscope is responsible for driving a single vehicle (a single nanocar).
Laboratory of Nano and Quantum Engineering
The collective term nanotechnology describes the study and manipulation of objects at smallest sizes. In general, the nanotechnology deals with structures ranging in size from 1-100 nanometers in at least one spatial direction. 100 nanometers are roughly one-thousandth of the diameter of a normal human hair. With these small dimensions surface properties come to the fore compared with the bulk properties of materials and also often quantum effects has to be taken into account. Nanotechnology is the technology of small things with new features and functionalities.
Seconds (song)
"Seconds" is the second track on U2's 1983 album, "War". The track, with its recurring lyric of "it takes a second to say goodbye", refers to nuclear proliferation. It is the first song in the band's history not sung solely by Bono, as the Edge sings the first two stanzas.
CDC 6000 series
Information is stored in central memory in the form of words. The length of each word is 60 binary digits (bits). The highly efficient address and data control mechanisms involved permit a word to be moved into or out of central memory in as little as 100 nanoseconds.
Metric time
Although part of the decimal metric system, the second derives its name from the sexagesimal system, which originated with the Sumerians and Babylonians, and divides a base unit into sixty minutes, minutes into sixty seconds, seconds into sixty tierces, etc. The word "minute" comes from the Latin "pars minuta prima", meaning first small part, and "second" from "pars minuta secunda" or second small part. Angular measure also uses these sexagesimal units; in that field, it is the degree that is subdivided into minutes and seconds, while in time, it is the hour.
Glossary of video terms
Abbreviation of megabits per second. One megabit is equal to one million bits or 1,000 kilobits. It is used to measure high data transfer speeds of connections such as Ethernet and cable modems.
Nanomaterials
Monodisperse powders of colloidal silica, for example, may therefore be stabilized sufficiently to ensure a high degree of order in the colloidal crystal or polycrystalline colloidal solid which results from aggregation. The degree of order appears to be limited by the time and space allowed for longer-range correlations to be established. Such defective polycrystalline colloidal structures would appear to be the basic elements of sub-micrometer colloidal materials science, and, therefore, provide the first step in developing a more rigorous understanding of the mechanisms involved in microstructural evolution in high performance materials and components.
The quantitative analysis of nanomaterials showed that nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanocrystalline materials, nanocomposites, and graphene have been mentioned in 400000, 181000, 144000, 140000, and 119000 ISI-indexed articles, respectively, by Sep 2018. As far as patents are concerned, nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanocomposites, graphene, and nanowires have been played a role in 45600, 32100, 12700, 12500, and 11800 patents, respectively. Monitoring approximately 7000 commercial nano-based products available on global markets revealed that the properties of around 2330 products have been enabled or enhanced aided by nanoparticles. Liposomes, nanofibers, nanocolloids, and aerogels were also of the most common nanomaterials in consumer products.
Metre per hour
The term is rarely used however as the units of metres per second and kilometres per hour are considered sufficient for the majority of circumstances. Metres per hour can however be convenient for documenting extremely slow moving objects. A Garden Snail for instance, typically moves at a speed of up to 47 metres per hour.
Nanomaterials
Nano-objects are often categorized as to how many of their dimensions fall in the nanoscale. A "nanoparticle" is defined a nano-object with all three external dimensions in the nanoscale, whose longest and the shortest axes do not differ significantly. A "nanofiber" has two external dimensions in the nanoscale, with "nanotubes" being hollow nanofibers and "nanorods" being solid nanofibers. A "nanoplate" has one external dimension in the nanoscale, and if the two larger dimensions are significantly different it is called a "nanoribbon". For nanofibers and nanoplates, the other dimensions may or may not be in the nanoscale, but must be significantly larger. A significant different in all cases is noted to be typically at least a factor of 3.
Minute and second of arc
Minutes (′) and seconds (″) of arc are also used in cartography and navigation. At sea level one minute of arc along the equator or a meridian (indeed, any great circle) equals exactly one geographical mile along the Earth's equator or approximately one nautical mile (1852 meters, or ≈1.15078 statute miles). A second of arc, one sixtieth of this amount, is roughly 30 meters or 100 feet. The exact distance varies along meridian arcs because the figure of the Earth is slightly oblate (bulges a third of a percent at the equator).
Time discipline
Since a sundial has only one "hand," a minute probably only meant "a short time." It took centuries for technology to make measurements precise enough for minutes (and later seconds) to become fixed meaningful units—longer still for milliseconds, nanoseconds, and further subdivisions.
Millisecond
100 milliseconds (one tenth of a second, 10) are called a decisecond.
Millisecond furnace
A Millisecond Furnace is a device used for cracking naphtha into ethylene, by extremely short (50 to 100 millisecond) exposure to temperatures of about 900 degrees Celsius, followed by a rapid quenching below 750 degrees Celsius.
Millimetre
One millimetre is equal to micrometres or nanometres. A millimetre is equal to exactly (approximately 0.039370) of an inch.
Nanoparticle
Nanoclusters have at least one dimension between 1 and 10 nanometers and a narrow size distribution. Nanopowders are agglomerates of ultrafine particles, nanoparticles, or nanoclusters. Nanometer-sized single crystals, or single-domain ultrafine particles, are often referred to as nanocrystals.
Light-second
Just as the second forms the basis for other units of time, the light-second can form the basis for other units of length, ranging from the light-nanosecond (299.8 mm or just under one international foot) to the light-minute, light-hour and light-day, which are sometimes used in popular science publications. The more commonly used light-year is also presently defined to be equal to precisely light-seconds, since the definition of a year is based on a Julian year (not Gregorian year) of exactly 365.25 days, each of exactly SI seconds.
Watt
The watt second is a unit of energy, equal to the joule.
One kilowatt hour is 3,600,000 watt seconds.
Second (disambiguation)
A second is a unit of time.
The 1 Second Film
The title of "The 1 Second Film" derives from the fact that the animation at the core of the film project is just one second long (24 frames). The animation consists of 12 large frames (9 ft x 5 ft paintings). The frames were painted by hundreds of people during a multi-disciplinary event on March 8, 2001 (International Women's Day) at California Institute of the Arts. The event included live-performers and musicians; people attending the event were invited to help paint the frames of animation. Each frame had an art director that engaged the audience as participants; color design for the animation was selected by Jules Engel. Each of the 12 paintings is filmed twice (on 70 mm film) to create the 24 frames in one second of film.
Words per minute
Morse code uses variable length sequences of short and long duration "signals" (dots and dashes) to represent source information e.g. sequences for the letter "K" and numeral "2" are respectively () and (). This variability complicates the measurement of Morse code speed rated in words per minute. Using telegram messages, the average English word length is about five characters, each averaging 5.124 dot durations or baud. Spacing between words should also be considered, being seven dot durations in the USA and five in British territories. So the average British telegraph word was 30.67 dot times. So the baud rate of a Morse code is × word per minute rate.
List of humorous units of measurement
One furlong per fortnight is very nearly 1 centimetre per minute (to within 1 part in 400). Indeed, if the inch were defined as 2. cm rather than 2.54 cm exactly, it would be 1 cm/min. Besides having the meaning of "any obscure unit", furlongs per fortnight have also served frequently in the classroom as an example on how to reduce a unit's fraction. The speed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight (or megafurlongs per microfortnight).
Second
A second is part of other units, such as frequency measured in hertz (inverse seconds or second), speed (meters per second) and acceleration (meters per second squared). The metric system unit becquerel, a measure of radioactive decay, is measured in inverse seconds. The meter is defined in terms of the speed of light and the second; definitions of the metric base units ampere and candela also depend on the second. Of the 22 named derived units of the SI, only three: degree Celsius, radian, and steradian, do not depend on the second. Many derivative units for everyday things are reported in terms of larger units of time, not seconds, such as clock time in hours and minutes, velocity of a car in miles per hour or kilometers per hour, kilowatt hours of electricity usage, and speed of a turntable in rotations per minute.
Metre per second
1 foot per second = (exactly)
Lincos (artificial language)
The next section of the Lincos dictionary introduces a word for second, "Sec," by playing pulses of various lengths, followed by Sec, and the number of seconds, "until the receiver may be expected to remark that the numbers... are proportional to the durations," thus teaching both that Sec is a unit of time, and exactly how long it is. He then introduces means for measuring durations, referring to moments in time, and talking about past and future events.
Mem (computing)
Clock rate, Instructions per second, CAS latency, Memoization, Clock signal, Nanosecond, Benchmarking, Computer performance
Glasshouse (novel)
Kilosecond : 16 minutes
Nanocar
The Nanodragster is 50,000 times thinner than a human hair and has a top speed of 0.014 millimeters per hour (0.0006 in/h). The rear wheels are spherical fullerene molecules, or buckyballs, composed of sixty carbon atoms each, which are attracted to a dragstrip that is made up of a very fine layer of gold. This design also enabled Tour’s team to operate the device at lower temperatures.
Neutron star
In 1982, Don Backer and colleagues discovered the first millisecond pulsar, PSR B1937+21. This object spins 642 times per second, a value that placed fundamental constraints on the mass and radius of neutron stars. Many millisecond pulsars were later discovered, but PSR B1937+21 remained the fastest-spinning known pulsar for 24 years, until PSR J1748-2446ad (which spins more than 700 times a second) was discovered.
Picosecond
One picosecond is equal to 1000 femtoseconds, or 1/1000 nanoseconds. Because the next SI unit is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10 and 10 second are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of picoseconds. Some notable measurements in this range include:
Nautical mile
In 1617 the Dutch scientist Willebrord Snell assessed the circumference of the Earth at 24,630 Roman miles (24,024 statute miles). Around that time British mathematician Edmund Gunter improved navigational tools including a new quadrant to determine latitude at sea. He reasoned that the lines of latitude could be used as the basis for a unit of measurement for distance and proposed the nautical mile as one minute or one-sixtieth () of one degree of latitude. As one degree is of a circle, one minute of arc is of a circle (or, in radians, ). These sexagesimal (base 60) units originated in Babylonian astronomy. Gunter used Snell's circumference to define a nautical mile as 6,080 feet, the length of one minute of arc at 48 degrees latitude. Since the earth is not a perfect sphere but is an oblate spheroid with slightly flattened poles, a minute of latitude is not constant, but about at the poles and at the Equator, with a mean value of . France and other countries measured the minute of arc at 45 degrees latitude, making the nautical mile .
Nanoart
A characteristic example of nanoart is "A Boy and His Atom", a one-minute stop-motion animated film created in 2012 by IBM Research from 242 images sized by 45×25 nm, which were recorded with a scanning tunneling microscope. The movie tells the story of a boy and a wayward atom who meet and become friends. The film was accepted into the Tribeca Online Film Festival and shown at the New York Tech Meet-up and the World Science Festival.
24-hour clock
Where subsecond resolution is required, the seconds can be a decimal fraction; that is, the fractional part follows a decimal dot or comma, as in 01:23:45.678. The most commonly used separator symbol between hours, minutes and seconds is the colon, which is also the symbol used in ISO 8601. In the past, some European countries used the dot on the line as a separator, but most national standards on time notation have since then been changed to the international standard colon. In some contexts (including the U.S. military and some computer protocols), no separator is used and times are written as, for example, "2359".
Traditional Chinese timekeeping
The Mahāsāṃghika, translated into Chinese as the "Móhēsēngzhī Lǜ" (Taishō Tripiṭaka 1425) describes several units of time, including "shùn" or "shùnqǐng" () and "niàn". According to this text, "niàn" is the smallest unit of time at 18 milliseconds and a "shùn" is 360 milliseconds. It also describes larger units of time, including a "tánzhǐ" () which is 7.2 seconds long, a "luóyù" () which is 2 minutes 24 seconds long, and a "xūyú" (), which is of a day at 48 minutes long.
Millisecond pulsar
The first millisecond pulsar, PSR B1937+21, was discovered in 1982 by Backer "et al". Spinning roughly 641 times a second, it remains the second fastest-spinning millisecond pulsar of the approximately 200 that have been discovered. Pulsar PSR J1748-2446ad, discovered in 2005, is, as of 2012, the fastest-spinning pulsar currently known, spinning 716 times a second.
Sodium
Twenty isotopes of sodium are known, but only Na is stable. Na is created in the carbon-burning process in stars by fusing two carbon atoms together; this requires temperatures above 600 megakelvins and a star of at least three solar masses. Two radioactive, cosmogenic isotopes are the byproduct of cosmic ray spallation: Na has a half-life of 2.6 years and Na, a half-life of 15 hours; all other isotopes have a half-life of less than one minute. Two nuclear isomers have been discovered, the longer-lived one being Na with a half-life of around 20.2 milliseconds. Acute neutron radiation, as from a nuclear criticality accident, converts some of the stable Na in human blood to Na; the neutron radiation dosage of a victim can be calculated by measuring the concentration of Na relative to Na.
Nanometre
The nanometre is often used to express dimensions on an atomic scale: the diameter of a helium atom, for example, is about 0.1 nm, and that of a ribosome is about 20 nm. The nanometre is also commonly used to specify the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation near the visible part of the spectrum: visible light ranges from around 400 to 700 nm. The ångström, which is equal to 0.1 nm, was formerly used for these purposes, but is still used in other fields. Since the late 1980s, in usages such as 32 nm and 22 nm, it has also been used to describe typical feature sizes in successive generations of the ITRS Roadmap for miniaturization in the semiconductor industry.
Unit of time
Units of time based on orders of magnitude of the second include the nanosecond and the millisecond.
Caesium
Since 1967, the International System of Measurements has based the primary unit of time, the second, on the properties of caesium. The International System of Units (SI) defines the second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles at the microwave frequency of the spectral line corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine energy levels of the ground state of caesium-133. The 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures of 1967 defined a second as: "the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of caesium-133 atoms in their ground state undisturbed by external fields".
Bit time
The bit time for a 10 Mbit/s NIC is 100 nanoseconds. That is, a 10 Mbit/s NIC can eject 1 bit every 0.1 microsecond (100 nanoseconds = .1 microseconds).
Graphical timeline of the Big Bang
It is a logarithmic scale that shows formula_1 "second" instead of "second". For example, one microsecond is formula_2. To convert −30 read on the scale to second calculate formula_3 second = one millisecond. On a logarithmic time scale a step lasts ten times longer than the previous step.
Shake (unit)
Like many nuclear units, it is derived from top secret operations of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The word comes from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", which indicates a very short time interval. For nuclear-bomb designers, 10 nanoseconds was a convenient specific interval to connect to this term.
Minute and second of arc
The arcsecond is also often used to describe small astronomical angles such as the angular diameters of planets (e.g. the angular diameter of Venus which varies between 10″ and 60″), the proper motion of stars, the separation of components of binary star systems, and parallax, the small change of position of a star in the course of a year or of a solar system body as the Earth rotates. These small angles may also be written in milliarcseconds (mas), or thousandths of an arcsecond. The unit of distance, the parsec, named from the "par"allax of one arc "sec"ond, was developed for such parallax measurements. It is the distance at which the mean radius of the Earth's orbit would subtend an angle of one arcsecond.
Nanostructure
In describing nanostructures, it is necessary to differentiate between the number of dimensions in the volume of an object which are on the nanoscale. Nanotextured surfaces have "one dimension" on the nanoscale, i.e., only the thickness of the surface of an object is between 0.1 and 100 nm. Nanotubes have "two dimensions" on the nanoscale, i.e., the diameter of the tube is between 0.1 and 100 nm; its length can be far more. Finally, spherical nanoparticles have "three dimensions" on the nanoscale, i.e., the particle is between 0.1 and 100 nm in each spatial dimension. The terms nanoparticles and ultrafine particles (UFP) are often used synonymously although UFP can reach into the micrometre range. The term "nanostructure" is often used when referring to magnetic technology.
Kenji Ohmori
National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan (NIMS), Institute for Molecular Science (IMS)Kenji Ohmori has succeeded in designing and visualizing spatiotemporal images given by the interference of matter waves of atoms in a molecule with picometer and femtosecond resolution [1,2]. The precision of this processing is the highest to date, higher than that of the current nanotechnology by three orders of magnitudes. This ultrahigh-precision processing has been implemented with the temporal oscillations of laser electric fields engineered with attosecond precision and imprinted on the matter waves of atoms and electrons in a molecule. He has utilized this technique to develop a molecular computer in which a single 0.3-nanometer-size molecule can calculate 1000 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer [3,4]. He has also developed an ultrafast quantum simulator that can simulate non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems in one nanosecond, introducing a novel concept where he has combined his ultrafast coherent control with attosecond precision and ultracold atoms cooled down to temperatures close to absolute zero[5].
List of humorous units of measurement
According to Gian-Carlo Rota, the mathematician John von Neumann used the term microcentury to denote the maximum length of a lecture. One microcentury is 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds – one millionth of a century.
High-frequency trading
The speeds of computer connections, measured in milliseconds or microseconds, have become important. Competition is developing among exchanges for the fastest processing times for completing trades. For example, in 2009 the London Stock Exchange bought a technology firm called MillenniumIT and announced plans to implement its Millennium Exchange platform which they claim has an average latency of 126 microseconds. This allows sub-millisecond resolution timestamping of the order book. Off-the-shelf software currently allows for nanoseconds resolution of timestamps using a GPS clock with 100 nanoseconds precision.
Decimal time
In principle, time spans greater than one second are given in units such as kiloseconds (ks), myriasecond (mys), megaseconds (Ms), gigaseconds (Gs), and so on. (The myriasecond is based on the "myria-" prefix, which represented a multiple of 10000 but was made obsolete in the mid-20th century.) Occasionally, these units can be found in technical literature, but traditional units like minutes, hours, days and years are much more common, and are accepted for use with SI.
Metre per second
The metre per second (American English: meter per second) is an SI derived unit of both speed (scalar) and velocity (vector quantity which specifies both magnitude and a specific direction), defined by distance in metres divided by time in seconds.
Data mile
The speed of light is 983571056 ft/s, or about one foot per nanosecond. If it were exactly one foot per nanosecond, and a target was one data mile away, then the radar return from that target would arrive 12 microseconds after the transmission. (Recall that radar was developed during World War II in America and England, while both were using English units. It was convenient for them to relate 1 data mile to 12 microseconds, whereas the modern tendency would be to approximate the speed of light as 3e8 m/s.)
Faraday cup
where N is the number of ions observed in a time t (in seconds), I is the measured current (in amperes) and e is the elementary charge (about 1.60 × 10 C). Thus, a measured current of one nanoamp (10 A) corresponds to about 6 billion ions striking the faraday cup each second.
Nano guitar
The nano guitar is a microscopically small carved guitar. It was developed by Dustin W. Carr in 1997, under the direction of Professor Harold G. Craighead, in the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility. The idea came about as a fun way to illustrate nanotechnology, and captured popular attention. It is disputed as to whether the nano guitar should be classified as a guitar, but it is the common opinion that it is in fact a guitar.
Nanotechnology miniaturizes normal objects, in this case a guitar. It can be used to create tiny cameras, scales and listening devices. An example of this is smart dust, which can be either a camera or a listening device smaller than a grain of sand. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. For comparison, a human hair is about 200,000 nanometers thick. The nano guitar is about as long as one-twentieth of the diameter of a human hair, 10 micrometers or 10,000 nanometers long. The six strings are 50 nanometers wide each. The entire guitar is the size of an average red blood cell. The guitar is carved from a grain of crystalline silicon by scanning a laser over a film called a 'resist'.
Billionth
In the short (or American) scale, a billionth is equal to 0.000 000 001, or 1 x 10 in scientific notation or standard form. The prefix for this number is nano, and is abbreviated as "n" (for example, in electronics, one nanofarad would be written as 1 nF).
Radian per second
The radian per second (symbol: rad·s or rad/s) is the SI unit of rotational speed (angular velocity), commonly denoted by the Greek letter "ω" (omega). The radian per second is also the unit of angular frequency.
The radian per second is defined as the change in the orientation of an object, in radians, every second.
Since the radian is a dimensionless unit, the radian per second is dimensionally equivalent to the hertz—both are defined as s. This may lead to confusion between the quantities angular frequency "ω" and frequency "ν".
Inverse second
The inverse second, reciprocal second, or per second (s) is a unit of frequency, defined as the multiplicative inverse of the second (a unit of time). It is dimensionally equivalent to:
It also provides the denominator for temporal rates, such as that of angular frequency in radians per second.
Minute and second of arc
A second of arc, arcsecond (arcsec), or arc second is of an arcminute, of a degree, of a turn, and (about ) of a radian.
These units originated in Babylonian astronomy as sexagesimal subdivisions of the degree; they are used in fields that involve very small angles, such as astronomy, optometry, ophthalmology, optics, navigation, land surveying, and marksmanship.
LULI2000
NANO2000, the nanosecond version of LULI2000, consists in two Nd:Glass laser chains, 200 mm in diameter, delivering each 1 kJ in nanosecond pulses at 1.05 µm wavelength. After frequency doubling or tripling, a large part of the energy may be converted to 0.53 µm or 0.35 µm.
These beams are then focussed in the middle of a 2 m diameter vacuum chamber where they irradiate targets of different types. The interaction itself and the characteristics of the laser-generated hot plasmas are diagnosed by a whole set of dedicated diagnostics.
NABTS
In a normal NTSC video signal there are 525 "lines" of video signal. These are split into two half-images, known as "fields", sent every 60th of a second. These images merge on-screen, and in-eye, to form a single frame of video updated every 30th of a second. Each line of each field takes 63.5 μs to send; 50.3 μs of video and 13.2 μs amount of "dead time" on each end used to signal the television that the line is complete, known as the horizontal blanking interval (HBI). When the scanning process reaches the end of the screen it returns to the top during the vertical blanking interval (VBI), which, like the HBI requires some "dead time" to properly frame the signal on the screen. In this case the dead time is represented by unused lines of the picture signal, normally the top 22 lines of the frame.
Atomic clock
For context, a femtosecond () is to a second what a second is to about 31.71 million () years and an attosecond () is to a second what a second is to about 31.71 billion () years.
Donglei Fan
The resulting nanomotor is less than 1 micrometer in all dimensions, making it 1/500th the size of a grain of table salt. Significantly, it is small enough to fit inside a human cell.
It is able to spin at much higher speeds than previous nanomotors. It can run at speeds up to 18,000 rpm, comparable to the rate of a jet engine. The duration of rotation such nanomotor is as long as 15 hours. With a titanium nanobearing, one can run for as long as 80 hours with a total 1.1 million rotation cycles. Previous nanomotors could run at 500 rpm or less for seconds or minutes.
Joule-second
The joule-second "should not be confused" with the physical process of joules per second (J/s). In legitimate physical processes, when the unit of time appears in the denominator of a ratio, the described process occurs at a rate. For example, in discussions about speed, an object like a car travels a known distance of kilometers spread over a known number of seconds, and the car’s rate of speed becomes kilometers per second (km/s). In physics, work per time describes a system’s power; defined by the units of Watts (J/s), or joules per second. A similar analogy does not apply to the expression kg∙m∙ s because the units kg∙m in the numerator have no physical meaning like the numerators of distance and energy shown in these examples.
Millisecond
To help compare orders of magnitude of different times, this page lists times between 10 seconds and 10 seconds (1 millisecond and one second). "See also" times of other orders of magnitude.
National Research Council Time Signal
This is followed by a single 800 Hz beep lasting 0.3 seconds. The word "exactly" (in French, "précises") replaces "and "x" seconds"/"et "y" seconds" at the top of the minute. Additionally, there is an 800 Hz "tick" every second in the background.
List of unusual units of measurement
The measurement of time is unique in SI in that while the second is the base unit, and measurements of time smaller than a second use prefixed units smaller than a second (e.g. microsecond, nanosecond, etc.), measurements larger than a second instead use traditional divisions, including the sexagesimal-based "minute" and "hour" as well as the less regular "day" and "year" units. SI allows for the use of larger prefixed units based on the second, a system known as metric time, but this is unusual.
Shake (unit)
A shake is an informal unit of time equal to 10 nanoseconds, or 10 seconds. It has applications in nuclear physics, helping to conveniently express the timing of various events in a nuclear reaction, especially neutron reactions. The typical time required for one step in the chain reaction (i.e. the typical time for each neutron to cause a fission event, which releases more neutrons) is of the order of 1 shake, and the chain reaction is typically complete by 50 to 100 shakes.
Orders of magnitude (time)
An order of magnitude of time is (usually) a decimal prefix or decimal order-of-magnitude quantity together with a base unit of time, like a microsecond or a million years. In some cases, the order of magnitude may be implied (usually 1), like a "second" or "year". In other cases, the quantity name implies the base unit, like "century". In most cases, the base unit is seconds or years. Prefixes are not usually used with a base unit of years, so we say "a million years", not "a megayear". Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, i.e. a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds.
Metric prefix
The second, millisecond, microsecond, and shorter are common. The kilosecond and megasecond also have some use, though for these and longer times one usually uses either scientific notation or minutes, hours, and so on.
Foot per second squared
The foot per second squared (plural "feet per second squared") is a unit of acceleration. It expresses change in velocity expressed in units of feet per second (ft/s) divided by time in seconds (s) (or the distance in feet (ft) traveled or displaced, divided by the time in seconds (s) squared). The corresponding unit in the International System of Units (SI) is the metre per second squared.
NanoSight
Each instrument comprises a scientific camera, a microscope, and a sample viewing unit (LM12 or LM14). The viewing unit uses a laser diode to illuminate particles in liquid suspension that are held within or advanced through a flow chamber within the unit. The instrument is used in conjunction with a computer control unit that runs a custom-designed Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) software package. NTA analyzes videos captured using the instrument, giving a particle size distribution and particle count based upon tracking of each particle's Brownian motion. Tracking is carried out for all particles in the laser scattering volume to produce a particle size distribution using the Stokes-Einstein equation, relating the Brownian motion of a particle to a sphere-equivalent hydrodynamic radius.
Light-year
Light travels approximately one foot in a nanosecond; the term "light-foot" is sometimes used as an informal measure of time.
Error analysis for the Global Positioning System
The GPS satellites move at relative to Earth's center. We thus determine:
This difference below 1 of represents the fraction by which the satellites' clocks move slower than Earth's. It is then multiplied by the number of nanoseconds in a day: