Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider turned lead into gold – by accident (theconversation.com)

submitted 3 days ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org

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Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

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[-] atro_city@fedia.io 7 points 3 days ago

Once a lead nucleus has transformed by losing protons, it is no longer on the perfect orbit that keeps it circulating inside the vacuum beam pipe of the Large Hadron Collider. In a matter of microseconds it will collide with the walls.

This effect makes the beam less intense over time. So for scientists, the production of gold at the collider is in fact more of a nuisance than a blessing.

*sigh* "Send in the janitor to scrape the gold off the walls. Bloody gold is disturbing our equipment again!".

[-] Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

This sounds like something Cave Johnson would say in Portal 2 lol

[-] SuiXi3D@fedia.io 8 points 3 days ago

I can understand how such tech would be valuable for the electronics industry. I wonder if they’d be able to turn lead into copper? Or something else? It’s an interesting thought.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago

Interesting thought, yeah, but this method isn't going to be viable for mass production, possibly ever.

They produced 89000 nuclei per second.
1 gold atom weighs about 196.96657 u.
1 u is 1.66053906892 * 10^−27^ kg.

Therefore, we can calculate how much gold they'd produce in a year:
196.96657 u/atom * 1.66053906892*10^−27^ kg/u * 89 000 atoms/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 917.9905991879 * 10^-15^ kg/year

That's still basically nothing. If they ran these streams continuously for a billion years, that's when we'd get close to producing 1 gram.

And it won't really start scaling much either, since you'll always need to accelerate a proportional amount of lead to near-light-speed, no matter what you produce with this method. But yeah, maybe we'll find a different method at some point.