Electrostatic units


The electrostatic system of units is a system of units used to measure quantities of electric charge, electric current, and voltage within the centimeter–gram–second system of metric units. In electrostatic units, electrical charge is defined by the force that it exerts on other charges.
Although the CGS units have mostly been supplanted by the MKSA or International System of Units units, the electrostatic units are still in occasional use in some applications, most notably in certain fields of physics such as in particle physics and astrophysics.
The main electrostatic units are:
The CGS-ESU units for magnetic quantities are seldom used, and don't have special names. Sources tend to just use 'esu' or the derived unit expressed in terms of the CGS base units. For example, the unit for magnetic induction is g/cm, corresponding to gauss, and corresponding to × , where = / = is the numeric part of speed of light expressed in CGS units.