A unit of energy equal to one million electron volts, commonly used in nuclear and particle physics. It represents the kinetic energy gained by an electron accelerated through a potential difference of one million volts.
An acronym formed in the 20th century from 'mega-' (million) + 'electron volt'. The electron volt was coined in the 1930s as physicists needed a practical unit for measuring the tiny energies involved in atomic processes.
The MeV elegantly demonstrates how scientists create units tailored to their scale of investigation - just as we measure distance in miles rather than inches for long journeys, physicists use MeV instead of joules for nuclear reactions. One MeV equals about 1.6 × 10⁻¹³ joules, a scale so small that a flying mosquito has about 10¹² times more kinetic energy!
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