What unit is latent heat measured in?

Latent heat is the amount of energy required to change a substance from one state to another at a constant temperature, such as from solid to liquid (melting) or liquid to gas (vaporization). The unit for measuring latent heat is joules per kilogram (J/kg), which indicates the energy change per unit mass of the substance involved in the phase change.

This unit effectively conveys how much energy is necessary to alter the state of a specific mass of a material, making it a critical component in thermodynamics, particularly in studying heat transfer during phase transitions. Other units listed, such as joules per meter, newtons per square meter, and kilojoules per mole, pertain to different contexts in physics, such as energy density, pressure, or chemical thermodynamics, respectively, and do not accurately describe latent heat.