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The Large Hadron Collider has been busy destroying protons by the billions. But now it’s set to do something completely different: generate miniature Big Bangs.

Scientists and researchers at CERN in Geneva are gearing up to launch experiments that attempt to recreate, as accurately as possible, the conditions immediately after the Big Bang, Discovery News reports. That could shed light on a state of matter that hasn’t existed in the known Universe for over 13.7 billion years.

Specifically, scientists are planning to begin shooting lead ions around the 17-mile-long LHC beginning later this month. The theory goes that when accelerated to relativistic speeds, and then collided head-on with protons in the other direction, the resulting energy explosion will cause the production of brand new particles, the report said. Call it E=mc squared in its purest form.

A version of this has actually happened before, but on a much smaller scale, in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where scientists were able to measure temperatures of 4 trillion Kelvin after colliding gold ions.

“Matter exists in various states: you can take a material like water and if you deep freeze it, it’ll be solid, and if you put it on a table, it’ll turn into a liquid, and if you put it into a kettle, it’ll turn into a gas,” CERN’s spokesman James Gillies said in a separate BBC News report.

“It’s all the same stuff, but those are different states of matter. And if you take materials into laboratories, you can pull the electrons off the atoms and you have another state of matter which is called plasma.” Plasma is nothing new, of course; the difference here is that researchers hope to find something entirely different, in order to then probe the nature of the quantum world.

To date, scientists have focused on proton to proton collisions, which have generated energies that could have lead to the creation of the Higgs boson and other new particles. But this latest series of experiments will, in theory, create actual micro Big Bangs that could help researchers see back in time, according to the reportand further back than we ever have before.