Tiny but mighty, the Big ALICE accelerator at CERN recently restarted operations, sending beams of ions around its 17-kilometer circumference. Big ALICE is a proton-proton collider that accelerates and collides heavy ions, producing temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. The collider has been dormant in recent years, but researchers are now using it to investigate the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial state of matter that existed in the early Universe. This restart is part of a larger project to upgrade Big ALICE and use it for a variety of experiments, unlocking the secrets of the most extreme states of matter.

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source: Phys.org