WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.

They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy'sBrookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds.

But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed.

"That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons," Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor told a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington on Monday.

These particles make up atoms, but they are themselves made up of smaller components called quarks and gluons.

What the physicists are looking for are tiny irregularities that can explain why matter clumped out of the primeval hot soup.

They also hope to use their findings for more practical applications -- such as in the field of "spintronics" that aims to make smaller, faster and more powerful computing devices.

They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), a particle accelerator and collider that is 2.4 mile around and buried 12 feet underground in Upton, New York to collide gold ions billions of times.

"RHIC was designed to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe," Vigdor said. They calculate the 4 trillion degree temperature gets pretty close.

"How hot is it?" he asked.