3 ms·

I'm no specialist either, and initially I had the same thought, but wikipedia says this about an electron volt: > An electron-volt is the amount of energy gain

I'm no specialist either, and initially I had the same thought, but wikipedia says this about an electron volt: > An electron-volt is the amount of energy gained or lost by a single electron when it moves through an electric potential difference of one volt. I feel like if it was actually an electron-volt-second, that would appear in the definition. So I'm thinking that once the electron has traveled from a place of higher voltage to a place of lower voltage, it has gained energy according to the potential difference, and it doesn't actually matter whether it took a second or a year to do so. It's easy to think of voltage as something like field strength, to be held more or less constant as the particle accelerates, but really it's a difference between two points, start and end, so the trip length has already been accounted for in the voltage measurement, and doesn't need to be further accounted for by measuring the time it took? Unsure, but that's my feeling anyhow.

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
Strictly speaking, the energy gained by a charged particle along any path is the integral of the dot product between the electric field and the line element along the path (edit: times the charge). In the absence of changing magnetic fields, this is always the difference between the voltage at the starting and ending points. What I was getting at is that there's only so much energy a field can put into a particle. Either the voltage will drop because the machine can't "keep up," or the particle will reach a terminal velocity where the force applied by the field is insufficient to accelerate the particle any more. But, barring those two things, the particle will continue to accelerate.