Gigaelectronvolts to Calories (GeV to cal)

1 gigaelectronvolt equals 3.829294058×10⁻¹¹ calories (rounded).

1 gigaelectronvolt = 3.829294058×10⁻¹¹ calories

How to convert gigaelectronvolts to calories

To convert gigaelectronvolts to calories, multiply the number of gigaelectronvolts by 3.829294058×10⁻¹¹. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply calories by 26,114,473,968 (rounded).

calories = gigaelectronvolts × 3.829294058×10⁻¹¹

Example: 10 gigaelectronvolts = 3.829294058×10⁻¹⁰ calories.

The 'calorie' on food labels is really a kilocalorie. The thermochemical calorie (4.184 J) is used here unless marked IT.

About these units

Gigaelectronvolt (GeV)

ScientificCurrent unit

One billion electronvolts. The scale of particle accelerators; the proton mass is about 0.938 GeV/c².

Accelerators brought this unit into use. Older documents wrote BeV for billion electronvolts, and the Bevatron at Berkeley, which began operating in 1954 and reached a maximum of 13 GeV, took its name from the idea. Creating antiprotons there needed a proton beam of about 6.2 GeV, and the antiproton was found in 1955. The modern symbol GeV equals 1.602176634 x 10^-10 J.

Masses of heavy particles are quoted in GeV/c squared. A proton is about 0.938 GeV/c squared, and the Higgs boson, announced on 4 July 2012 at CERN, has a mass near 125 GeV, about 133 times the proton. At the Large Hadron Collider each proton beam reached 6.5 TeV in 2015, which is 6,500 GeV. The step above is the TeV, a thousand GeV, so the GeV sits in the middle of the energy range of high-energy physics.

1 gigaelectronvolt = 1.602176634×10⁻¹⁰ joules (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Bevatron; Wikipedia: Large Hadron Collider; Wikipedia: Electronvolt; Wikipedia: Proton

Calorie (cal)

ScientificTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

The thermochemical calorie: exactly 4.184 joules, the energy to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Not the same as the food Calorie, which is a kilocalorie.

Latin calor, meaning heat, supplied the name. Nicolas Clement used it in lectures on heat engines between 1819 and 1824, and by 1852 Pierre Favre and Jean Silbermann applied it to the small unit based on a single gram of water warmed by one degree Celsius. Because the specific heat of water varies slightly with temperature, early calories differed from one laboratory to the next. A mean value near 4.1855 J was published for the 15 degree calorie in 1950, with an uncertainty of 0.0005 J.

Chemists settled the matter by definition. The thermochemical calorie is exactly 4.184 J, which is the figure used here, and NIST lists it with that exact value. The calorie is not an SI unit and is regarded as obsolete, since the ninth General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1948 preferred the joule for heat. One thousand of these calories make a kilocalorie, the larger unit used for food, and a slightly larger calorie, the International Table version of 4.1868 J, is used in steam tables.

1 calorie = 4.184 joules (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Calorie; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8 (energy conversion factors)

Related conversions

See all energy units.