https://www.scinexx.de/news/physik/physiker-machen-blei-zu-gold/
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Modern alchemy: Turning lead into gold was the old dream of medieval alchemists - now it is becoming a reality. The LHC particle accelerator near Geneva can produce gold by colliding lead nuclei. Up to 89,000 gold nuclei are created every second in the accelerator's ALICE detector alone. Over the years, this adds up to billions of gold atoms, as CERN physicists have determined.
The alchemists of antiquity and the Middle Ages had a great goal: they wanted to transform base metals such as lead into gold - the noblest and most imperishable of all metals. Many scholars tried to achieve this transmutation through chemical experiments, while others searched for the philosopher's stone that would make this so-called chrysopoeia possible. Even the astronomer Tycho Brahe and the natural scientist Isaac Newton devoted themselves to alchemy. However, none of them were successful.
No wonder: lead and gold are different elements that cannot be converted into each other by any chemical reaction in the world. The only way to achieve this is to manipulate the nucleus of the lead atom: if three protons are removed, gold can be created.
This is exactly what happens in one of the largest machines in the world: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN research center near Geneva. Protons normally collide with each other at almost the speed of light in the 27-kilometer ring of the LHC. For a few weeks, however, physicists will also use the facility to collide lead nuclei instead. The main aim is to create and research a quark-gluon plasma in the LHC's ALICE detector - the cosmic "primordial soup".
However, in these lead collisions in the LHC, it often happens that the heavy lead nuclei just miss each other. Nevertheless, these ultraperipheral collisions (UPC) are not without consequences: The strongly positively charged atomic nuclei, accelerated to 99.999993 percent of the speed of light, generate strong electromagnetic fields that interact with each other during the close passage.
"The resulting forces can cause the electromagnetic dissociation of the atomic nuclei," explain the physicists from the ALICE collaboration. The result: the lead atoms lose some neutrons and protons - and the latter creates new elements such as thallium, mercury and gold.
