Convert Square Dekameter (dam²) to Barn (b (area)) instantly.
About these units
Square Dekameter (dam²)
A square dekameter equals 100 square meters and is used in agriculture, sports field planning, and land measurement in some metric-oriented countries. It is particularly useful for measuring the footprint of small buildings, gardens, or sport courts. Landscape architects and civil engineers may express project areas in dam² when m² values become too large and hectares too large-scale. Although not as common as the square meter or hectare, the dam² exemplifies the flexibility of the metric system for scaling area units to suit practical needs.
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.