YB
Abbreviation with 2 meanings
| Stands for | Yottabyte |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 2 |
| Categories | Units & Measurements, Science & Engineering |
| Also written | Yb |
YB has two meanings. It stands for Yottabyte (data unit) or Ytterbium (chemical element).
Meanings of YB at a glance
| # | YB stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yottabyte | Units & Measurements › Data Unit |
| 2 | Ytterbium | Science & Engineering › Chemical Element |
1. Yottabyte
Units & Measurements · Data Unit Abbreviations
10^24 bytes, a trillion terabytes. No single system, nor the whole internet, comes close to a yottabyte; the unit appears mainly in projections and comparisons.
Example: Storing a single YB on today's 20 TB hard drives would take 50 billion drives.
Until 2022 the yottabyte was the largest named data unit; the new SI prefixes ronna- and quetta- now allow the ronnabyte (RB, 10^27) and quettabyte (QB, 10^30). The binary counterpart is the yobibyte (YiB, 2^80 bytes).
2. Ytterbium (Yb)
Science & Engineering · Chemical Element Abbreviations
Some of the world's most precise optical lattice clocks tick with atoms of ytterbium, element 70, a soft lanthanide. Ytterbium-doped fiber lasers, emitting near 1 micrometer, are workhorses of industrial cutting, welding and marking.
Example: The laser cutter's source is a 6 kW Yb fiber laser.
Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac separated ytterbia from erbia in 1878, naming it after Ytterby, the Swedish village honored by three other elements. Ytterbia was itself later found to hide another element, lutetium, in 1907. In 2013 an ytterbium lattice clock at NIST set a record for stability, part of the research toward redefining the SI second.
Related abbreviations
More data unit abbreviations
- b – Bit
- bps – Bits per second
- dpi – Dots per inch
- DWPD – Drive writes per day
- EB – Exabyte
- EiB – Exbibyte
- FLOPS – Floating-point operations per second
- FPS – Frames per second
See all 36 data unit abbreviations →