Centimeters to Picometers (cm to pm)

1 centimeter equals 10,000,000,000 picometers exactly.

1 centimeter = 10,000,000,000 picometers

How to convert centimeters to picometers

To convert centimeters to picometers, multiply the number of centimeters by 10,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply picometers by 1×10⁻¹⁰.

picometers = centimeters × 10,000,000,000

Example: 10 centimeters = 100,000,000,000 picometers.

About these units

Centimeter (cm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.

Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.

CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.

1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Picometer (pm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One trillionth of a meter. Atomic diameters are typically a few hundred pm.

One trillionth of a meter, the picometer (pm) is the SI length that sits below the nanometer and above the femtometer. It equals 0.01 angstrom, so a figure in angstroms converts by multiplying by 100. Wikipedia notes that the symbol mu-mu was once used for it, and the NIST list of SI prefixes gives pico as 10 to the power of minus 12.

In practice the unit belongs to chemistry and atomic physics, where distances between bonded atoms are expressed as a few hundred of them. A carbon to carbon single bond is about 154 pm long, and a helium atom is estimated at about 62 pm across, while atoms in general run from roughly 62 to 520 pm in diameter. Chemists who grew up with the angstrom increasingly quote the same distances in picometers, because the angstrom is no longer part of the SI. Gravitational-wave work pushes the scale further: the planned LISA detector is expected to resolve displacements of about 20 pm over a 2.5 million kilometer baseline.

1 picometer = 1×10⁻¹² meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Picometre; NIST: metric (SI) prefixes; Wikipedia: Angstrom

Related conversions

See all length units.