Planck Charge

In physics, the Planck charge, denoted by, is one of the base units in the system of natural units called Planck units. It is a quantity of electric charge defined in terms of fundamental physical constants.

The Planck charge is defined as:

coulombs,

where:

is the speed of light in the vacuum,
is Planck's constant,
is the reduced Planck constant,
is the permittivity of free space
is the elementary charge
= (137.03599911)−1 is the fine structure constant.

The Planck charge is times greater than the elementary charge e carried by an electron.

The Gaussian cgs units are defined so that, in which case has the following simple form:

It is customary in theoretical physics to adopt the Heaviside-Lorentz units (also known as rationalized cgs). When made natural they are like the SI system with . Therefor it is more appropriate to define the Planck charge as

coulombs,

When charges are measured in units of, i.e., when is set equal to 1, we obtain, which is commonly used in theoretical physics. In contrast, in (non-rationalized) natural cgs units where we have .

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