For the first time, physicists have created a new form of matter by recreating the conditions thought to have existed 10 microseconds after the Big Bang at the start of the universe, scientists announced Thursday.

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), based outside Geneva, said scientists from more than 20 countries conducted a series of experiments which smashed together heavy lead ions in a fireball to prove a theory that had only existed on paper for years.

By generating collisions at temperatures 100,000 times as hot as the sun's center and at energy densities never before reached in laboratory experiments, they succeeded in isolating tiny components called quarks from more complex particles such as protons and neutrons, CERN said in a report.

This provided ``compelling evidence'' for the existence of a new state of nuclear matter, a quark-gluon plasma, which CERN described as ``the primordial soup in which quarks and gluons existed before they clumped together as the universe cooled down.''

According to CERN, the breakthrough in the project affectionately known as the ``Little Bang,'' is an important step in understanding the early state of the universe, created some 12 to 15 billion years ago in a massive explosion, or Big Bang.

CERN plans to begin an experimental program, including a heavy ion experiment, at its Large Hadron Collider in 2005. (Reuters)