Convert Acre (US Survey) (ac (US)) to Barn (b (area)) instantly.
About these units
Acre (US Survey) (ac (US))
The US survey acre is based on the US survey foot, making it slightly different from the international acre. With a value of 43,560 survey-square feet, it appears extensively in historical property records and federal land surveys. Because millions of acres in the United States were mapped using PLSS, the survey acre remains necessary for interpreting legal land rights, even though modern mapping often uses metric units or the international foot. This specialized acre illustrates how subtle unit differences can survive for centuries due to legal and administrative inertia.
Barn (b (area))
The barn is an area unit used almost exclusively in nuclear and particle physics, equal to 10⁻²⁸ square meters. Despite its incredibly tiny size, the barn emerged from humorous origins: early nuclear physicists joked that certain atomic nuclei were "as big as a barn" compared to the particles trying to hit them. The barn quantifies interaction cross-sections—essentially probabilities of particles colliding or interacting with nuclei. Because fundamental forces operate at extremely small scales, typical cross-section values lie in the microbarn, nanobarn, or picobarn range. The barn is essential for describing reaction rates in particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, and astrophysical processes such as stellar fusion.