Tera- (/ˈtɛrə/; symbol T) is a metric prefix denoting a factor of a short-scale trillion or long-scale billion (10 or 1000000000000). It was adopted in the International System of Units (SI) in 1960. The prefix is derived from the Greek word τέρας (téras), meaning "monster".
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In this Dossier
Tera- in the context of Bits per second
In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable R) is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time.
The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction with an SI prefix such as kilo (1 kbit/s = 1,000 bit/s), mega (1 Mbit/s = 1,000 kbit/s), giga (1 Gbit/s = 1,000 Mbit/s) or tera (1 Tbit/s = 1,000 Gbit/s). The non-standard abbreviation bps is often used to replace the standard symbol bit/s, so that, for example, 1 Mbps is used to mean one million bits per second.
Tera- in the context of Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
The first collisions were achieved in 2010 at an energy of 3.5 tera-electronvolts (TeV) per beam, about four times the previous world record. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC was announced in 2012. Between 2013 and 2015, the LHC was shut down and upgraded; after those upgrades it reached 6.5 TeV per beam (13.0 TeV total collision energy). At the end of 2018, it was shut down for maintenance and further upgrades, and reopened over three years later in April 2022.
Tera- in the context of Color confinement
In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement or infrared slavery, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles (such as quarks and gluons) cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions below the Hagedorn temperature of approximately 2 terakelvin (corresponding to energies of approximately 130–140 MeV per particle). Quarks and gluons must clump together to form hadrons. The two main types of hadron are the mesons (one quark, one antiquark) and the baryons (often three quarks or antiquarks, though other exotic variants exist). In addition, colorless glueballs formed only of gluons are also consistent with confinement, though difficult to identify experimentally. Quarks and gluons cannot be separated from their parent hadron without producing new hadrons.