system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
what are the large voltages described in particle accelerators measured against?

in press releases from the LHC, proof of the higgs was demonstrated by evidence occurring at huge voltages. what potential differences are these particles being measured against? and we read claims of gigantic voltages made in reference to the overall power of particle accelerators. what source are these voltages measured against?
gpt
If you're referring to measurements in "electron volts," that is a unit of energy equivalent to the energy gained by an electron dropping through a potential difference of one volt. The mass of particles is often described in electron volts per c^2 , but the c^2 is usually ignored and we say that the electron has a mass of 511,000 eV, the proton about a billion. The particles in the colliders have a kinetic energy, also described in eV. When they have the same kinetic energy as rest mass energy, they are travelling at 86% the speed of light, and when the kinetic energy is much greater, they are going very close to light speed. The protons in the LHC have about 7 TeV of kinetic energy (in the rest frame of the collider), about 7000 times their rest mass energy, and in the center-of-mass frame of each collision they have about 13 TeV (I think it's designed to go up to 14 TeV).

The protons are accelerated to those speeds using electric fields, and those involve the extreme voltages you're talking about.