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Chapter 1 – Fundamentals of Medical/Aesthetic Lasers and IPLs v1.1
Appendix 2 - Prefixes
Often in this field you will see a ‘prefix’ after a number. You are probably familiar with some of these, like ‘mm’ for millimetre, or ‘kg’ for kilogram.
There is an internationally accepted set of such prefixes (Note - the capitalisation is important!!):
Prefix
Name
Factor
Scientific Notation
T
Tera
1,000,000,000,000
1012
G
Giga
1,000,000,000
109
M
Mega
1,000,000
106
k
kilo
1,000
103
n/a
n/a
1
100
m
milli
0.001
10-3
μ
micro
0.000 001
10-6
n
nano
0.000 000 001
10-9
p
pico
0.000 000 000 001
10-12
f
femto
0.000 000 000 000 001
10-15
So, 30 nanoseconds is 30 ns which is 0.000 000 03 seconds.
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Chapter 1 LEVEL A Fundamentals of Lasers/IPLs
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