The Townsend (symbol Td) is a physical unit of the ratio E/N, where is electric field and is concentration of neutral particles. It is defined by the relation .
This unit is important in gas discharge physics, because the mean energy of electrons (and therefore many other properties of discharge) is a function of . It means that increasing the electric intensity E by some factor q has the same consequences as lowering gas density N by factor q.
It is named after John Sealy Townsend.