GENEVA, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Monday claimed their particle-collision experiments have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the Universe.
After analyzing data from the four-week experiments carried out in 2011, which ran the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with ions, scientists confirmed the new findings based on experiments at the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
During the four-week run, scientists at three experiments on the LHC --ALICE, ATLAS and CMS, collected 20 times more data than the previous run in 2010.
The results are expected to be presented at this week's 2012 Quark Matter conference held in Washington DC, during which refined characterizations of the densest and hottest matter ever studied in the laboratory -- 100,000 times hotter than the interior of the Sun and denser than a neutron star, are to be made public.
CERN hailed the findings, said they are advancing our understanding of the primordial Universe.
Just after the Big Bang, 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 recreate for a fleeting moment conditions similar to those of the early Universe. By examining a billion or so of these collisions, the experiments have been able to make more precise measurements of the properties of matter under these extreme conditions.
Experiments at CERN have made breakthroughs this year after decades of construction and hard search.
Earlier in July, CERN scientists said they have observed a new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, a theorized sub-atomic particle believed to confer mass.
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