In the 1980s, the term picowave was used to describe food irradiation in order to overcome public resistance by playing on the well-known safety of microwave radiation. Find the energy in MeV of a photon having a wavelength of a picometer.

Video Transcript

This is College Physics Answers with Shaun Dychko. What is the energy in megaelectron volts of a photon with a wavelength of a picometer? So picometer is 1 times 10 to the minus 12 meters and the energy of a photon is Planck's constant times speed of light divided by wavelength. So that's 6.636 times 10 to the minus 34 joule seconds times 2.998 times 10 to the 8 meters per second divided by 1 times 10 to the minus 12 meters that gives this many joules which we then convert into electron volts by dividing by 1.602 times 10 to the minus 19 joules and then convert that into megaelectron volts by dividing by 1 times 10 to the 6 and then we have 1.24 megaelectron volts is the energy of a picometer photon.