Terme de Glossaire

Electron-volt

A unit of energy. An eV is the amount of energy gained by an electron when it accelerates in electric field through an electric potential difference of one volt. A TeV corresponds more or less to the energy of a flying mosquito! As tiny as it may seem, at the CERN's LHC and other particle accelerators this energy is squeezed in a space a thousand billion times smaller than a mosquito. As a consequence of the link between mass and energy (E=mc²), the eV is also a way of expressing a particle's mass. Strictly speaking, the mass is measured in units of eV/c², but if there is no ambiguity, one can simply write eV.

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