Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have achieved the hottest manmade temperatures ever, by colliding lead ions to momentarily create a quark-gluon plasma, a subatomic soup and unique state of matter that is thought to have existed just moments after the Big Bang, Nature News reports.

ALICE physicists, presenting on Monday at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, said they have achieved a quark–gluon plasma 38% hotter than a record 4-trillion-degree plasma achieved in 2010 by a similar experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory.