A particle accelerator is a device that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams.

There are two basic classes of accelerators, known as electrostatic and oscillating field accelerators. Electrostatic accelerators use static electric fields to accelerate particles. A small-scale example of this class is the cathode ray tube in an ordinary old television set. Other examples are the Cockcroft–Walton generator and the Van de Graaf generator. The achievable kinetic energy for particles in these devices is limited by electrical breakdown. Oscillating field accelerators, on the other hand, use radio frequency electromagnetic fields and circumvent the breakdown problem. This class, which development started in the 1920s, is the basis for all modern accelerator concepts and large-scale facilities. Rolf Widerøe, Gustav Ising, Leó Szilárd, Donald Kerst and Ernest Lawrence are considered as pioneers of this field, conceiving and building the first operational linear particle accelerator, the betatron, and the cyclotron.

Don Lincoln is an American particle physics researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a codiscoverer of the top quark. He has coauthored hundreds of research papers and, more recently, contributed to ruling out possible values of the Higgs boson's mass.

Lincoln is a public speaker and science writer and has contributed many science articles in magazines that include Analog Science Fiction and Fact in July 2009. He is also the author of books describing particle physics written for the public. They are "Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos" (2004), "Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos (Revised edition)" (2012) and "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" (2009).

In recent years, he has been heavily involved in research using the DZero detector at the Fermilab Tevatron and also at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His popularizations also include columns that translate CMS (monthly) and DZero (biweekly) physics measurements for the public.