A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented in the 1930s by American physicist Ernest Lawrence and his team at the University of California, Berkeley. Its primary purpose was to accelerate charged particles, such as protons or ions, to very high energies for use in nuclear physics experiments. By achieving higher energies, researchers could probe deeper into the structure and interactions of atomic nuclei and gain insights into the fundamental forces and particles governing the universe at the subatomic level.