The Glade 4.0

The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.

The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

Up until now, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator - which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) - has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe's formation. Proton collisions could help spot the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry. But for the next four weeks, scientists at the LHC will concentrate on analysing the data obtained from the lead ion collisions.

This way, they hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. One of the accelerator's experiments, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions, but the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments have also switched to the new mode.

'Strong force'

David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK, is one of the researchers working at ALICE. He said that the collisions obtained were able to generate the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment.

"We are thrilled with the achievement," said Dr Evans. "This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun. "At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."

Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.

He explained that by studying the plasma, physicists hoped to learn more about the so-called strong force - the force that binds the nuclei of atoms together and that is responsible for 98% of their mass.

After the LHC finishes colliding lead ions, it will go back to smashing together protons once again.

I see phrases like "temperatures over ten trillion degrees" and "safe, controlled environment" and my brain eventually gives up and stops trying to make them fit. Unless they've developed some sort of super star trek heat resistant environment that they don't want me to know about, nothing on earth can withstand that amount of heat without melting.

So? An outside force caused particles to react. The particles didn't get put there by themselves nor did they react without the application of outside force.

The latter of which, I agree, is likely impossible for us to perform.

Yuppers, creating the exact conditions for the experiment is impossible.

We don't know the original conditions. Therefore, by creating an experiment that shows the immediate results, we are able to gain understanding about what the conditions might have been.

We don't know the original conditions. Therefore, by creating an experiment that shows the immediate results, we are able to gain understanding about what the conditions might have been.

The suppositions for the big bang include one moment where space and time don't even exist... then the next moment sees the spontaneous creation of a singularity ...

Actually, science hasn't (and really, cannot) do any more than wildly speculate on conditions before expansion, or the origin of the singularity that all mass in the universe originates from. It is entirely possible (though currently, thought to be unlikely) that the universe is like a yo-yo, expanding and contracting in an endless series of big crunches and big bangs.

Given that singularities form on the collapse of quite large stars... It is a reasonable argument that the collapase of the universe as a whole would indeed yield a singularity.