Scientists turn lead into (a tiny bit of) gold
Photo of the ALICE detector (Photo: CERN)
May 7, 2025 – Transforming the base metal lead into the precious metal gold was a dream of medieval alchemists. But it never worked; until now. Scientists from CERN (a European organization that conducts fundamental research into elementary particles) used the so-called LHC particle accelerator to make atomic nuclei of lead collide so hard that they changed their composition. This only happened for a very short time and produced a tiny amount of gold, which could only be detected with special ultra-sensitive equipment – the so-called ALICE detector.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is an underground particle accelerator built on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. The LHC has been the most powerful particle accelerator in the world since it was put into operation in 2008. The results of the research were published on May 7 in the scientific journal Phisics Review C. It is online>
https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.111.054906
