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gnufxyesterday at 10:48 PM0 repliesview on HN

In the context of the article "collider" means intersecting particle beams, like in RHIC and LHC, which obviously involves rather low probability interactions, as opposed to accelerators which slam a beam into a dense target (like the SLAC accelerator). In a synchrotron light source you want the beam to circulate and specifically not collide with anything; they were developed from particle physics accelerators, of course.