Gigaelectronvolts to Watt-hours (GeV to Wh)

1 gigaelectronvolt equals 4.45049065×10⁻¹⁴ watt-hours exactly.

1 gigaelectronvolt = 4.45049065×10⁻¹⁴ watt-hours

How to convert gigaelectronvolts to watt-hours

To convert gigaelectronvolts to watt-hours, multiply the number of gigaelectronvolts by 4.45049065×10⁻¹⁴. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply watt-hours by 22,469,432,668,059 (rounded).

watt-hours = gigaelectronvolts × 4.45049065×10⁻¹⁴

Example: 10 gigaelectronvolts = 4.45049065×10⁻¹³ watt-hours.

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

Watt-hour (Wh)

Metric (SI)Current unit

Exactly 3,600 joules, the energy used by a one-watt device in an hour. Battery capacities are quoted in watt-hours.

Pair a power unit with a unit of time and you get the watt-hour: one watt sustained for one hour, which works out to 3,600 joules. The watt itself was adopted at the second International Electrical Congress in 1889, in the same session that adopted the joule, so the two units share a birthday even though the watt-hour is the one people read off batteries.

Battery capacity is where it earns its keep. Multiplying amp-hours by the battery voltage gives an estimate of watt-hours, so a 2,500 mAh lithium-ion cell at 3.7 V holds roughly 9.25 Wh. That is why a 500 mA USB device runs about 3.7 hours on it rather than five: the cell voltage, not the 5 V from the port, sets the energy.

For scale, an alkaline AA battery holds about 9 kJ, which is 2.5 Wh. A 12 W LED lamp left on for an hour uses 12 Wh, and a 40 W appliance running for 25 hours uses 1,000 Wh.

1 watt-hour = 3,600 joules (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Watt-hour; Wikipedia: Joule; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (energy)

Related conversions

See all energy units.