An old dream of alchemists has come true in Europe. Scientists involved with the world’s largest particle accelerator, the large Hadrons collier (LHC) of the European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN), managed to turn lead into gold – but only for some fractions of a second and at a huge cost. The experience was released by the magazine Naturein May 2025.
This transmutation of the matter happened in a laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, where the LHC accelerator – the most powerful in the world – merged the lead ions and turned them into gold.
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The old alchemical search for the transformation of lead into gold
Antiquity chemicals have always intended to transform lead into Earth’s most precious metal.
However, the differences in the number of protons between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made this chemical equation impossible for human technology to the present.
How was the process of turning lead into gold?
European researchers achieved the unprecedented effect aiming at lead beams against each otherplacing them at speeds close to that of light with the help of the large Hadron collier (LHC).
The ions are glad at each other instead of crashing into front. When this happens, the intense electromagnetic field around the ion can create a power pulse that causes the lead nucleus into approximation three protons-turning it into gold.
Unstable gold atoms detection
The Alice experiment, of the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, filtered these occurrences of transmutation of broader collision debris.
In an analysis published also in May this year, in Physical Review Journalsthe team calculated that between 2015 and 2018 the collisions in LHC created 86 billion gold nuclei – about 29 trilliones of grass.
Most unstable and fast -moving gold atoms would have lasted about 1 microsecond before colliding with the experimental apparatus or fragment in other particles.
Gold production in LHC will not be used commercially
Gold is produced whenever lead beams collide in the large Hadrons collier (LHC), but Alice is the only experiment configured to detect this process.
The analysis “is the first to systematically detect and analyze the mark of gold production in LHC experimentally,” says Uliana Dmitieva, physics and member of the collaboration Alice, to the official website of the European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN).
CERN researchers They do not have plans to dedicate themselves to gold production as a parallel activitybut they claim that better understanding how photons can change nuclei will help them improve their most powerful particle throttle performance ever.
