Courses
Courses for Kids
Free study material
Offline Centres
More
Store Icon
Store

Is Coulomb an SI unit?

seo-qna
SearchIcon
Answer
VerifiedVerified
393k+ views
Hint: As a very first step, you could recall Coulomb forms the SI unit of which physical quantity which is a very basic knowledge any science student must have. You could then recall other units of that particular quantity. After that you could find the SI unit among them and hence you will get the answer.

Complete answer:
In the question, we are asked whether coulomb is an SI unit. You may recall that coulomb is the unit in which charge is measured.
What you should note is that coulomb is a unit of electric charge in a meter-kilogram-second-ampere system which further forms the basis of the SI system of physical units. Also, it is normally abbreviated as C. Now we could try and define one coulomb using some known definitions. One coulomb is that charge whose flow in one second results in one ampere current.
So, we could make this conclusion that Coulomb is indeed the SI unit of charge.

Additional information:
You may wonder why SI units are given this much importance. The whole purpose of assigning units to quantities is to make it universal. That is, when you take a measurement in SI units throughout the world people know what that means.

Note:
This unit is named after the well known French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb. One coulomb is found equivalent to$6.24\times {{10}^{18}}electrons$ approximately. In case if you are wondering where this approximation comes from you may recall that the elementary charge of one electron is known to be$1.602\times {{10}^{-19}}C$ . From this value we get that number electrons in one coulomb will be as mentioned above.