Question: what is a particle ecelerator

Will Smith answered on 8 Nov 2019:

Particle accelerators are machines which accelerate charged particles or nuclei. They are used in research, industry and healthcare. Some examples are proton accelerators that shoot beams of protons at cancers helping to treat patients, the Large Hadron Collider which smashes particles together to recreate the conditions just after the start of the universe, and X-Ray Synchrotrons which make really powerful fast xrays that let us understand the structure of materials.