Curie (unit)
Physical unit | |
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Unit name | curie |
Unit symbol | |
Physical quantity (s) | activity |
Formula symbol | |
dimension | |
In SI units | |
Named after | Marie and Pierre Curie |
Derived from | Activity of radium -226 |
See also: Becquerel |
Curie is the obsolete unit of activity of a radioactive substance with the symbol Ci; it was used temporarily until 1985, when it was replaced by the SI unit Becquerel . Today it is only used in materials testing. 1 curie was originally defined as the activity of 1 g of radium -226, and later set to the approximately same value of 3.7 · 10 10 Becquerel (= 37 GBq).
The unit was named after Marie and Pierre Curie who, together with Antoine Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of radioactivity in 1903 .