On 13 August 2012 scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland, announced that they had achieved temperatures of over 5 trillion K and perhaps as high as 5.5 trillion K. The team had been using the ALICE experiment to smash together lead ions at 99% of the speed of light to create a quark gluon plasma – an exotic state of matter believed to have filled the universe just after the Big Bang.

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