This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Μm is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
| SI units | |
|---|---|
| 1.000×10−6 m | 1.0000 μm |
| US customary / Imperial units | |
| 3.281×10−6 ft | 39.37×10−6 in |
A micrometre (American spelling: micrometer; symbol µm) is one millionth of a metre, or equivalently one thousandth of a millimetre. It is also commonly known as a micron. It can be written in scientific notation as 1×10−6 m, meaning 1/1 000 000 m.
The symbol µm's character µ (Unicode character U+00B5; HTML µ) is "micro-", which should look identical to the Greek letter mu (μ) (the two may or may not look the same, depending on the font). The symbol µm is sometimes replaced by "um" when a suitable glyph for µ is not readily available, for example in ASCII or when using a typewriter, although this is non-standard.
The micrometer is a common unit of measurement for wavelengths of infrared radiation. Some people (especially in astronomy and the semiconductor industry) use the old name micron and/or the solitary symbol µ (both of which were official between 1879 and 1967 1) to denote a micrometer. This practice persists in the face of official discouragement, perhaps to help disambiguate between the unit of measurement and the micrometer, a measuring device.
Input
The µ symbol can be entered the following ways:
Alt+230- Alt code from CP437 and other IBM codepages; on Windows and DOS.Alt+0181- Alt code from ISO-8859-1 etc; on Windows.AltGr+m- on many non-US keyboard layouts, alsoOption+mon a Mac.Ctrl+Shift+B5- Unicode hex code; on Linux.
See also
- 1 E-6 m (for a comparative description of the micrometre in the context of other orders of magnitude)
- SI
- SI prefix
- Metric system
- Orders of magnitude
- Micronization
References
- ^ BIPM - Resolution 7 of the 13th CGPM (1967/68), "Abrogation of earlier decisions (micron, new candle)".
|
|||||
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 12 November 2008, at 13:41.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Μm".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.