LHC creates mini big bangs

The world's largest particle smasher - the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland - has seen the highest temperatures ever produced by a science experiment, thanks to a flurry of "mini big bangs".
On 7 November, the LHC started smashing lead ions head-on, instead of the usual proton-proton collisions. This produced what are referred to as mini big bangs: dense fireballs that have temperatures of about 10 trillion °C.
At such temperatures and energies, the nuclei of atoms melt into a mix of their constituent quarks and gluons. The fireball is known as a quark-gluon plasma. The formation of the plasma is a key prediction of the extremely successful theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which tells us that as we go back to earlier and earlier times in the universe's history, the strength of strong interactions falls almost to zero. The discovery of this so-called "asymptotic freedom" is what resulted in a Nobel Prize for David Politzer, Frank Wilczek and David Gross in 2004.
The quark-gluon plasma has been studied in great detail at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Upton, New York, which smashes gold ions head-on. In February 2010, RHIC researchers reported the creation of plasma that had temperatures of 4 trillion °C.
Now, thanks to a 287 TeV beam, the LHC's lead ions are colliding with energies about 13.5 times greater than what has been achieved at RHIC.The resultant plasma fireballs will allow physicists at CERN using the 10,000-tonne ALICE (A Large Heavy Ion Experiment) detector to study the universe as it was about a millionth of a second after the big bang.
One can only wonder about what surprises are in store. At RHIC, the biggest surprise was that the quark-gluon plasma, instead of being a gas, acts like a perfect liquid.