Physicists Turned Lead Into Gold—for a Fraction of a Second

Hundreds of years ago, alchemists dreamed of chrysopoeia: turning lead into gold. Scientists at the research institute CERN have achieved this medieval fantasy—if only for a fraction of a second. Physicists used the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to eject three protons from lead atoms—effectively transforming them into gold atoms. Though this isn’t the first time scientists have created artificial gold, the researchers used a new mechanism involving near-miss collisions. “The present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,” Uliana Dmitrieva, a physicist from the ALICE collaboration at CERN, said in an institute statement. ALICE stands for A Large Ion Collider Experiment, and is one of a number of experiments at CERN’s LHC. Dmitrieva did not participate in the study detailing the new mechanism, published Wednesday in the Physical Review Journals. Elements are defined ... Read full article.