text: Even though quark-gluon plasma can only occur under quite extreme conditions of temperature and/or pressure, it is being actively studied at particle colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory. 
  In these collisions, the plasma only occurs for a very short time before it spontaneously disintegrates. The plasma's physical characteristics are studied by detecting the debris emanating from the collision region with large particle detectors 
  Heavy-ion collisions at very high energies can produce small short-lived regions of space whose energy density is comparable to that of the 20-micro-second-old universe. This has been achieved by colliding heavy nuclei such as lead nuclei at high speeds, and a first time claim of formation of quark–gluon plasma came from the SPS accelerator at CERN in February 2000.
  This work has been continued at more powerful accelerators, such as RHIC in the US, and as of 2010 at the European LHC at CERN located in the border area of Switzerland and France. There is good evidence that the quark–gluon plasma has also been produced at RHIC.