Physicists turn lead into gold – just for a moment

Although alchemy – an ancient branch of natural philosophy dedicated to the pursuit of transmuting ‘base’ metals, such as lead, into ‘noble’ ones like gold – has long been debunked, scientists have managed to turn lead into the precious metal, if only for a fleeting moment.

Indeed, using a particle accelerator at CERN, researchers fired beams of lead atoms at one another, which then just slightly missed each other instead of colliding, creating a high energy pulse as a result, which then led to the lead atoms ejecting three protons – making gold, according to a recent report.

How to turn lead into gold

The ions occasionally do this – glancing past each other rather than hitting head-on – during which the strong electromagnetic field around an ion can create a pulse of energy and cause an oncoming lead nucleus to expel three protons, turning it into gold.

Specifically, the exact amount of the precious metal created was only 29 trillionths of a gram of gold, involved huge costs, and it survived for just a fraction of a second before smashing into experimental apparatus or breaking into other particles, but the implications are massive, allowing physicists to learn more about how particles interact and change.

This way, they also got closer to realizing the dream of seventh-century alchemists who hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold, but which was impossible to achieve using chemical means due to differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold).

Now it seems they were actually onto something. And although the amount of gold produced at CERN isn’t suitable nor lasts long enough to take up jewelry making just yet, it nonetheless offers a better understanding of how photons can change nuclei to improve the performance of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

According to Jiangyong Jia, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, “understanding such processes is crucial for controlling beam quality and stability.”

Meanwhile, other meaningful advances in scientific circles include quantum teleportation – not of people but information – making the basics for super-fast, super-secure communication via a novel nanophotonic platform that significantly improves the efficiency and fidelity of quantum information transfer.