  Our universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot and
dense singular point, in a process known as the Big Bang. The hot and dense
matter which dominated the system within a few microseconds of its birth was in
the form of a soup of elementary quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon
plasma (QGP). Signatures compatible with the formation of the QGP matter have
experimentally been observed in heavy-ion (such as Au or Pb) collisions at
ultra-relativistic energies. Recently, experimental data of proton-proton (pp)
collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have also shown signals
resembling those of the QGP formation, which made these studies quite
stimulating as to how the collision of small systems features in producing the
early universe signals. In this article, we report on some of the compelling
experimental results and give an account of the present understanding. We
review the pp physics program at the LHC and discuss future prospects in the
context of exploring the nature of the primordial matter in the early universe.
