CURIE

in physics, unit of the quantity of radioactive substances. In 1962 the International Commission on Radiological Units recommended that this unit be defined as the activity of a quantity of a radioactive nuclide for which the number of nuclear transformations in one second is exactly 3.7 1010. Other groups define the curie as the amount of radioactive material undergoing 3.7 1010 disintegration per second. The unit is named in honour of the French physicist Marie Curie.