Age-old dream comes true: researchers can turn lead into gold

Sounds too good to be true

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

The ancient medieval ambition to transform lead into gold, long regarded as unattainable, might now be possible according to a recent scientific breakthrough.

A concept known as chrysopoeia

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

For centuries, medieval alchemists labored away in their workshops trying to find a way to decipher the secrets behind transmuting lead into gold. Unfortunately, these historical experimenters were a few centuries early. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By GAllegre, Public Domain

Impossible through chemical means

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

“Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold,” the US science-based news outlet Scientific American explained. “But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means.”

New technology changed everything

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

The idea that a base metal like lead could be transmuted into gold is one that fell out of favor in the modern scientific world, though it is possible thanks to the capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 

Turning lead into gold

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

According to reports that flooded the internet in early May, physicists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) were able to observe lead being turned into gold during an experiment, though only a microscopic amount and just for a brief moment. 

Smashing lead particles together

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

The Large Hadron Collider smashes together particles of lead for each experiment that is run by researchers. However, it turns out gold was being created in the process in some instances, though it occurred not when lead ions smashed into each other but rather when they came close to their head-on collisions. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Lucas Taylor / CERN, CC BY-SA 3.0

Missing a collusion creates gold

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

“When this happens, the intense electromagnetic field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold,” Scientific American explained. This gold is unstable and only lasts for a microsecond before breaking apart.  

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Pcharito, Own Work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Creating gold with every experiment

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

Researchers at CERN have been turning lead into gold since they began experimenting, but it was the LHC’s ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)—what Newsweek noted was one of four main instruments on the LHC—that allowed scientists to observe the 'change' of lead into gold. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Antonio Saba, Own Work, CC BY-SA 3.0

An impressive feat

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

"It is impressive to see that our detectors can handle head-on collisions producing thousands of particles, while also being sensitive to collisions where only a few particles are produced at a time, enabling the study of electromagnetic 'nuclear transmutation' processes," ALICE spokesperson Marco Van Leeuwen, explained in a statement.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Antonio Saba, Own Work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Billions of gold nuclei created

Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

On May 7th, a study from a group of scientists associated with ALICE and CERN was published in ‘Physical Review Journals’. It revealed that between 2015 and 2018, the LHC created around 86 billion gold nuclei. That may sound like a lot of gold, but it really isn’t. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Pcharito, Own Work, CC BY-SA 3.0

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Sounds too good to be true, A concept known as chrysopoeia, Impossible through chemical means, New technology changed everything, Turning lead into gold, Smashing lead particles together, Missing a collusion creates gold, Creating gold with every experiment, An impressive feat, Billions of gold nuclei created

Scientific American reported that 86 billion gold nuclei are equal to about 29 trillionths of a gram of gold. Newsweek noted that this amount of gold would be trillions of times less than what is needed to make a wedding ring.

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