Joules to Gigaelectronvolts (J to GeV)

1 joule equals 6,241,509,074 gigaelectronvolts (rounded).

1 joule = 6,241,509,074 gigaelectronvolts

How to convert joules to gigaelectronvolts

To convert joules to gigaelectronvolts, multiply the number of joules by 6,241,509,074. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply gigaelectronvolts by 1.602176634×10⁻¹⁰.

gigaelectronvolts = joules × 6,241,509,074

Example: 10 joules = 62,415,090,745 gigaelectronvolts.

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

About these units

Joule (J)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of energy: the work done by a force of one newton over one meter, or one watt for one second.

James Prescott Joule was born in Salford on 24 December 1818, the son of a wealthy brewer, and later ran the family brewery while treating science as a serious hobby. In June 1845 he told a British Association meeting in Cambridge about his best-known experiment: a falling weight turned a paddle wheel inside an insulated barrel of water, and the water warmed up. Mechanical work turned into heat at a fixed rate, which supported energy conservation and undermined the caloric theory of heat.

The unit came later. On 23 August 1882 Carl Wilhelm Siemens proposed at a British Association meeting that a unit of heat equal to 10 million ergs be named the joule, and in 1889 the second International Electrical Congress adopted it alongside the watt. Joule died that same year. In 1948 the CGPM added that the joule should be preferred to the calorie as the unit of heat, and it entered the SI in 1960.

For scale, one joule is about the energy needed to lift an apple of roughly 102 g by one meter. A 56 g tennis ball moving at 6 m/s carries about one joule of kinetic energy.

The joule is the reference unit for energy on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Joule; Wikipedia: James Prescott Joule

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

Related conversions

See all energy units.