Scientists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, located between France and Switzerland, have managed to turn lead into gold.
The breakthrough did not come from an attempt to manufacture precious metal. Instead, researchers involved in the ALICE experiment were studying conditions similar to those believed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang when they ended up producing trace amounts of gold from lead nuclei.
Scientists say the total amount created was only around 29 trillionths of a gram.
The reason this is possible lies in the structure of atoms. Lead and gold are different elements because their atoms contain different numbers of protons. A gold atom has exactly three fewer protons than a lead atom. Basically, if three protons are stripped from a lead nucleus, it becomes gold.
To make it happen, scientists accelerated lead nuclei to nearly the speed of light and sent them racing past one another inside the collider. When these nuclei narrowly miss instead of crashing head-on, they generate extremely powerful electromagnetic fields. Those fields can disturb the nuclei enough to knock protons loose.
In rare cases, exactly three protons are removed, effectively transforming lead into gold. In other cases, the process produces different elements such as mercury, which forms when two protons are lost, and thallium, which appears when one proton is removed.
Researchers involved in the ALICE experiment estimate that these collisions produce around 89,000 gold nuclei every second during lead beam operations.
Interestingly, scientists do not directly observe the gold itself. Instead, they rely on highly specialized detectors known as zero-degree calorimeters, which count the stripped protons and help researchers infer which new elements were formed.
