Science as we know it today is different from the alchemy that enamored scientists of the past, but the drive to learn more about the world remains the same. While today’s scientists spend their lives researching new types of astronomical objects and how the universe began, ancient alchemists longed for much simpler goals, one of which was the transmutation of gold. The word “Chrysopoeia” refers to the artificial creation of gold, and despite the fact that even the most brilliant alchemists have failed in their lifelong efforts to achieve this, the transmutation of gold is surprisingly easy for today’s scientists, at least in theory. All you need is a particle accelerator, tons of energy, and a seemingly infinite amount of funds.
CERN has most of these, and so this undivided desire of the ancient alchemists has been realized by physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which runs the ALICE experiment – designed to observe collisions with heavy particles to simulate conditions just after the Big Bang. This happened while they were shooting lead particles close to the speed of light, which produced 86 billion gold nuclei. An impressive number, but an amount that cannot even be called negligible, since it amounts to only trillions of grams of gold.
It is also important to note that this gold cannot be used normally. The quantity is so tiny that you cannot observe it by any normal physical means, requiring the use of zero-degree calorimeters that count the smallest change in neutrons and protons. The gold atoms produced were also so unstable that they existed for no more than a microsecond before transforming into other particles to hit the apparatus, making this alchemical marvel little more than a nuisance to the physicists involved.
Read more: 9 lightning myths you need to stop believing (and what’s actually true)
How does this work
A person behind an atomic model symbol pointing at it – bigjom jom/Shutterstock
Lead differs from gold on a chemical level, making the two appear almost as physically different as possible. However, at the atomic level, the difference ends up being just the number of protons in the nuclei of their atoms. Lead has a total of 82 protons, compared to gold’s 79. This means that if there was a way to somehow remove exactly three protons from the lead nucleus, you would have a surefire way to produce gold. Unfortunately, we still cannot precisely control the number of lost protons, but this it is it is possible to brute force the removal of protons until a few cases result in the removal of three, which is what happened to the physicists at CERN.
Removing the protons is still not easy, however, because lead has an incredibly strong electromagnetic force that keeps its nucleus stable. To counteract this force, physicists used the power of close collisions. When two particles pass each other at close to the speed of light, their individual electromagnetic fields momentarily affect each other. This field can remove protons from a lead particle, turning it into either thallium, mercury and, yes, gold, depending on the number of protons removed.
As you might expect, this method still boils down to shooting particles at each other at high speeds and taking the chance that gold will be produced. The extremely small quantity produced, along with their high costs and low reliability, means that gold is not yet becoming abundant.
Since scientists created gold in the past
A person’s gloved hands holding a gold bar with other similar bars lying around, with a blurred vault door in the background – TSViPhoto/Shutterstock
ALICE physicists at CERN are not the first to artificially produce gold. In fact, there is a Guinness World Record for most gold produced from lead (although it is outdated). The first instance of creating artificial gold was in 1941 by transmuting mercury with fast-traveling neutrons, but this gold was an unstable, highly radioactive isotope.
The next properly documented instance was in 1980 by a team including Glenn T. Seaborg (for whom the element seaborgium is named) using bismuth isotopes. The scientists working on this said it was possible to create gold from lead as well, but this was not done at the time because of how unstable the gold produced would be, meaning it would be much more complicated to separate and observe the gold produced from lead. Similarly, in 2022, scientists at CERN produced a very small amount of gold nuclei – just 18 – from bombarding a uranium target.
Another group of CERN scientists, this time the Super Proton Synchrotron team, was the first to document the transmutation of lead into gold in 2002 and then again in 2004. They used the same process of near-accidental collisions, albeit with less power. This was repeated later, this time on a much larger scale. Even if the amount produced more recently is too small to be worth much, it’s still a huge improvement over previous results. Unless China resumes halted production of the world’s largest particle accelerator, it will likely be the closest it will come to producing gold for a while.
Did you like this article? Sign up for BGR’s free newsletter and add us as your go-to source for the latest tech and entertainment, plus tips and advice you’ll actually use.
Read the original article on BGR.