Pulse

A minimal temporal unit of musical time, a pulse is perceived as the shortest most common duration underlying the time-grid for a given sequence of events.
Although hierarchically beat descends from meter, and pulse from the ongoing beat-unit, pulse remains a contextual parameter, changing with the rhythmic profile of the stream of events.
Therefore, the perceived duration of a pulse  has an equal or smaller (but not larger) value than the perceived beat-unit itself.