Seconds to Picoseconds (s to ps)
1 second equals 1,000,000,000,000 picoseconds exactly.
How to convert seconds to picoseconds
To convert seconds to picoseconds, multiply the number of seconds by 1,000,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply picoseconds by 1×10⁻¹².
picoseconds = seconds × 1,000,000,000,000
Example: 10 seconds = 10,000,000,000,000 picoseconds.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Second (s)
The SI base unit of time, defined by the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom: 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.
Our word second is a leftover of Latin. Medieval scholars divided a degree, and later the hour, into 60 parts called pars minuta prima, the first small part, and divided those again into pars minuta secunda, the second small part. NIST traces the roots further back: Babylonian and Greek astronomers split the circle into 360 degrees, and around 150 C.E. Ptolemy split each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. Clocks that could show seconds appeared only in the later 16th century, and Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock of 1656 was the first able to keep time accurately to the second.
For most of history the second was a fraction of a day, and in 1956 it was redefined as a fraction of the tropical year, a definition the SI took over in 1960. In 1967 the 13th CGPM switched to atoms: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation tied to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133. The 2019 SI revision restated this by fixing the caesium frequency at 9,192,631,770 hertz. NIST reports that commercial caesium clocks stay within about a three-millionth of a second per year, and experimental clocks based on other atoms are roughly ten thousand times more precise.
The second is the reference unit for time on this site.
Sources: NIST: the second and the SI redefinition; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; Wikipedia: Second
Picosecond (ps)
One trillionth of a second. Used for very fast electronics.
Pico comes from SI prefix naming and stands for 10 to the power of minus 12, so a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. The BIPM and NIST prefix tables both list it with the symbol p, and the unit is written ps. It is an exact decimal fraction with no historical variation, which is why the factor used here carries no uncertainty.
Picoseconds matter where signals and molecules move too fast for milliseconds or nanoseconds to be useful. Light in a vacuum travels about 0.30 mm in one picosecond, so a millimetre takes roughly 3.3 ps. A 1 THz electromagnetic wave has a cycle time of 1.0 ps, the unit interval of a 10 Gbit/s serial link is 100 ps, and a 3.0 GHz processor cycle lasts about 330 ps. Streak cameras can resolve events on single-digit picosecond timescales, and Wikipedia lists the lifetime of a hydronium ion in water as about 1 ps. A picosecond is one thousandth of a nanosecond.
1 picosecond = 1×10⁻¹² seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Picosecond; BIPM: SI prefixes; NIST: Metric (SI) prefixes
Related conversions
- Picoseconds to seconds (reverse)
- Seconds to minutes
- Seconds to hours
- Seconds to days
- Seconds to weeks
- Seconds to months
- Seconds to years
- Seconds to milliseconds
- Seconds to microseconds
- Seconds to nanoseconds
- Seconds to decades
- Seconds to centuries
- Seconds to millennia
- Minutes to picoseconds
- Hours to picoseconds
- Days to picoseconds
- Weeks to picoseconds
- Months to picoseconds
- Years to picoseconds
See all time units.