Physicists Turn Leads into Gold – for just a second
The famous European particle corider scientist temporarily created gold ions from leads in a modern twist on the alchemical goal
The LHC experiment does not create large gold nuggets, but some particles in the lead ion beam can be converted to gold for about a second.
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Dream of 17th century alchemist It is realized by physicists Big Hadron Collider (LHC), turned the lead into gold – in just a few seconds, at an incredible cost.
The less meaningful transformation took place at CERN, a European Institute of Particle Physics, near Geneva, Switzerland. There, billions of dollars of LHC destroy lead ions in part of each experimental run.
Early chemists wanted to turn rich lead into precious gold. However, differences in proton numbers between elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made it impossible by chemical means.
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CERN researchers achieved the feat by targeting each other’s lead beams and getting closer to the speed of light. Sometimes ions pass each other rather than pounding their heads. When this occurs, the strong electromagnetic field around the ions creates pulses of energy, causing an approaching lead nucleus, ejecting three protons and converting them into gold.
CERN Alice Detector.
The Alice experiment in LHC excluded instances of these translations from the broader collision debris. In the analysis published on May 7th Physics Review JournalThe team calculated that between 2015 and 2018, conflicts at the LHC created a 86 billion gold nucleus. This is about 29 trillion grams. Most of the unstable, rapidly moving gold atoms would have lasted about a microsecond before hitting the experimental equipment or entering other particles.
Gold is made during the period when lead beams collide at LHC, but Alice is the only experiment with a detector set up to find this process. “The analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyze the ‘signature of gold production at LHCs,” says Uliana Dmitrieva, a physicist and member of the Alice Collaboration.
Jiang Yong Jia, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, said he observed another CERN accelerator called the SPS transformed into gold between 2002 and 2004. However, the latest experiments are more energy and are much more likely to make cleaner observations, he adds.
CERN researchers have no plans to address Goldmaking as a side hustle, but say that a better understanding of how photons change will help improve LHC performance. “Understanding these processes is important to controlling beam quality and stability,” says Jia.
This article was reproduced with permission and was First published May 9, 2025.
