Atom-smashing scientists reach highest ever recorded man-made temperature - 100,000 TIMES hotter then the Sun's interior

Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have broken a record by achieving the hottest man-made temperatures ever - 100,000 times hotter than the interior of the Sun.

Scientists there collided lead ions to create a searingly hot sub-atomic soup known as quark-gluon plasma at about 5.5trillion C, the hottest temperature ever recorded in an experiment.

That's about 40 per cent hotter the old record, set by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, by smashing gold ions together.

ALICE, an experiment built to discover the beginnings of the universe, which has now been used to create the hottest man made temperature.

But CERN's scientists weren't just trying to outdo the Yanks.

Scientists hope that their research will give them an insight into conditions just after the Big Bang.

Scientists believe that at the point in our universe's history quarks and gluons – basic building blocks of matter – were not confined inside composite particles such as protons and neutrons, as they are today.

Instead, they moved freely in a state of matter known as 'quark–gluon plasma'.

Collisions of lead ions in the LHC, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, recreate for a fleeting moment conditions similar to those of the early universe.

By examining a billion or so of these collisions, the experiments were able to make more precise measurements of the properties of matter under these extreme conditions.

The results came from the LHC's ALICE - A Large Ion Collider Experiment. On Monday the ALICE team presented their findings at the Quark Matter 2012 conference in Washington DC.

Part of the Large Hadron Collider, which has now been used to creates the highest man made temperature ever recorded

They claimed their quark-gluon plasma temperature came in about 38 per cent hotter than the current Guinness World Record holding experiment set by the RHIC.

ALICE spokesman Paolo Giubellino admitted that the measurement wasn't precise and said they haven't yet converted the energy measurement into degress.

But he added that there is no reason to suspect that the conversion will not produce a figure somewhere in the region of 5.5trillion C.

'It's a very delicate measurement,' Nature quoted Mr Giubellino as saying. 'Give us a few weeks and it'll be out.'

One of the magnets that make up the Large Hadron Collider being moved into place during its construction



