Physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider have been a bit of a loose end since discovering the Higgs particle, so they've broken the man-made temperature record for fun. And science.

The Alice heavy-ion experiment, a sister project to the more-famous Atlas and CMS experiments, collided lead ions to create -- for just a split second -- a quark-gluon plasma with a heat of around 5.5 trillion degrees Kelvin. Or Celsius. It doesn't really make much difference at temperatures that high.

Right now that measurement is a little uncertain. The team, who presented their work at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, announced that they'd beaten the previous record of four trillion degrees by 38 percent, but that they hadn't officially converted their energy readings into degrees yet. "It's a very delicate measurement," Alice spokesperon Paolo Giubellino said. "Give us a few weeks and it will be out."


Quark-gluon plasmas, which were first discovered in 2000, are pretty interesting as they replicate the Universe just a few hundred microseconds after the Big Bang. In these plasmas, the particles which make up matter are freed of the strong nuclear force by enormous energy densities. Understanding the properties of this unusual type of matter is crucial to understanding the early evolution of the Universe.

The Cern team has been competing for the high temperature record with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. In 2005, Brookhaven discovered that the plasmas behave like frictionless liquids, and the lab has since published data relating to how the plasma turns into a regular matter.

Steven Vignor from Brookhaven, said that there are "strong hints" that the experiments have been able to cross this boundary. "But we don't feel the evidence is compelling enough to make a clear statement."

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