TeV

TeV, short for teraelectronvolt, is a unit of energy equal to one trillion electronvolts (1 TeV = 10^12 eV). The electronvolt is the energy gained by an electron when accelerated through a potential difference of one volt, so 1 TeV corresponds to about 1.6×10^-7 joules. In high-energy physics, TeV is commonly used to expresses energies of particles in accelerators and of high-energy photons or cosmic rays. It sits in the metric hierarchy above the GeV (1 TeV = 1000 GeV) and far above the eV scale.

In collider physics, TeV-scale energies define the regime in which fundamental particles and interactions are probed. The Large Hadron Collider is designed to reach center-of-mass energies on the order of 14 TeV, and operations have achieved collisions around 13 TeV, with upgrades aimed at approaching the design energy. TeV energies can refer to the energy per particle in fixed-target setups or, more commonly in colliders, the total center-of-mass energy available in a collision.

TeV also appears in astrophysical contexts, where TeV photons are produced by extremely energetic processes, such as particle acceleration near compact objects or in supernova remnants. TeV gamma-ray astronomy detects these photons with ground-based atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, expanding the observational window of the high-energy universe.

Overall, TeV is a standard unit in contemporary physics for describing particle energies and high-energy phenomena, reflecting the energy scales reached by modern experiments and observations.