CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost
- Reference: 1747065793
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/05/12/cern_lead_into_gold/
- Source link:
Physicists at the multibillion-euro atom smasher near Geneva managed to transmute lead into gold during high-speed ion collisions, proving that you can defy nature if you throw enough money, energy, and hardware at the problem. Sadly – if you're an alchemist, and less so if you're a physicist – their golden bounty lasted for about a microsecond and weighed less than a fart in a vacuum.
This glittery miracle occurred not through occult incantations or dodgy tinctures, but by aiming [1]beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. Occasionally, instead of colliding head-on, the ions whizz past each other, close enough for their electromagnetic fields to get frisky. In rare moments of subatomic magic, a lead nucleus gets so rattled it ejects three protons, spontaneously reinventing itself as gold. Transmutation achieved.
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The [3]ALICE experiment – CERN's specialized kit for sorting through nuclear mayhem – picked out these atomic wardrobe changes from the mess of debris. Between 2015 and 2018, CERN clocked 86 billion gold atoms emerging from these lead-on-lead encounters, as reported by [4]Nature . That sounds impressive until you realize it adds up to about 29 trillionths of a gram.
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In other words, as observed on [7]Bluesky , supposing you "ran the experiment 300 million times, and collected those tiny gold atoms into a big pile, you would have gold with a market value of about a dollar."
Worse, most of the newly minted gold atoms don't hang around long enough to be admired. They smash themselves to bits or disintegrate almost instantaneously.
[8]Peter Higgs, daddy of the Higgs boson, dies at 94
[9]CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider
[10]CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator
[11]CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted
All the same, the [12]paper [PDF] on the findings, published on May 7 in Physical Review Journals, notes: "The transmutation of lead into gold is the dream of medieval alchemists which comes true at the LHC."
The observations are "the first to systematically detect and analyze the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally," said ALICE member Uliana Dmitrieva.
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While an earlier CERN accelerator achieved something similar two decades ago, this time it was at a higher energy, meaning a higher probability of gold and cleaner observations, said Stony Brook University physicist Jiangyong Jia.
Before you get any ideas about turning CERN into the world's most expensive mint, don't. "Understanding such processes is crucial for controlling beam quality and stability," Jia said – politely reminding everyone that gold is just a side effect, not a retirement plan.
So alchemists were right. Science can turn lead into gold. It just requires 27 kilometers of underground tunnel, a national budget's worth of funding, and the willingness to accept a return on investment measured in atomic particles. ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_pb_collisions
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aCJvfZtlUxf2v1Zuvy1s5wAAAgY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://home.cern/science/experiments/alice#:~:text=ALICE%20(A%20Large%20Ion%20Collider,called%20quark%2Dgluon%20plasma%20forms.
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01484-3
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aCJvfZtlUxf2v1Zuvy1s5wAAAgY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aCJvfZtlUxf2v1Zuvy1s5wAAAgY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://bsky.app/profile/pwnallthethings.bsky.social/post/3loxbi2mf6c2k
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/peter_higgs_obituary/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/cern_is_training_robot_dogs/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/06/cern_dark_matter_accelerator_proposal/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/27/cern_experiment_proves_gravity_pulls/
[12] https://journals.aps.org/prc/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevC.111.054906
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aCJvfZtlUxf2v1Zuvy1s5wAAAgY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I know someone who can turn Kale into such gases.
Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.
Genetic responses to medicines mean a patient-centric approach over a generic disease centric one. A throwback to medieval medicine.
Something that fills the void to explain dark energy. Wasn't that "ether" and proposed in the 1800s ?
And now, it seems it is possible to turn lead into gold.
Seems to me they had more right than wrong in olden times.
Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.
They had curiosity worth it's weight in gold. Can't fault that.
Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.
Indeed. And what we are calling "God" today is in fact an extremely complex set of mathematical equations governing the laws of the universe which humanity will one day understand.
So basically being a religious Christian fanatic is the same as being "correct" in the future right? ;)
Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.
"Wasn't that "ether" and proposed in the 1800s ?"
No.
The Truth
"The rumour spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words 'fire insurance').
The dwarfs can turn lead into gold... "
The opening to 'The Truth', the 25 th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett.
New gold from old
Bismuth to gold was already done in 1980, and bismuth was chosen because it is already closer to gold and the smaller quantity of gold produced by lead for the same budget might have been too difficult to detect/measure .
Using the LBNL’s Bevalac particle accelerator, Morrissey and his colleagues boosted beams of carbon and neon nuclei nearly to light speed and then slammed them into foils of bismuth. When a high-speed nucleus in the beam collided with a bismuth atom, it sheared off part of the bismuth nucleus, leaving a slightly diminished atom behind. By sifting through the particulate wreckage, the team found a number of transmuted atoms in which four protons had been removed from a bismuth atom to produce gold. Along with the four protons, the collision-induced reactions had removed anywhere from six to 15 neutrons, producing a range of gold isotopes from gold 190 (79 protons and 111 neutrons) to gold 199 (79 protons, 120 neutrons), the researchers reported in the March 1981 issue of Physical Review C.
The amount of gold produced was so small that Morrissey and his colleagues had to identify it by measuring the radiation given off by unstable gold nuclei as they decayed over the course of a year. In addition to the several radioactive isotopes of gold, the particle collisions presumably produced some amount of the stable isotope gold 197—the stuff of wedding bands and gold bullion—but because it does not decay the researchers were unable to confirm its presence. “The stable isotope would have to be observed in a mass spectrometer,” Morrissey says, “but I think that the number of atoms was, and is still, below the level of detection by mass spec.”
Isolating the minute quantities of gold would be even more difficult using lead as a starting material, but smashing high-speed nuclei into a lead target would indeed complete the long-sought transmutation. Some of the collisions would be expected to remove three protons from lead, or one proton from mercury, to produce gold. “It is relatively straightforward to convert lead, bismuth or mercury into gold,” Morrissey says. “The problem is the rate of production is very, very small and the energy, money, etcetera expended will always far exceed the output of gold atoms.”
In 1980, when the bismuth-to-gold experiment was carried out, running particle beams through the Bevalac cost about $5,000 an hour, “and we probably used about a day of beam time,” recalls Oregon State University nuclear chemist Walter Loveland, one of the researchers on the project. Glenn Seaborg, who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with heavy elements and who died in 1999, was the senior author on the resulting study. “It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment," Seaborg told the Associated Press that year. The going rate for an ounce of gold at the time? About $560."
"Fact or Fiction?: Lead Can Be Turned into Gold", Scientific American, Jan 31, 2014
Farts weigh the same in a vacuum as in an atmosphere. However, in a vacuum, the molecules and therefore the smell will dissipate faster...
In space, no-one can hear you fart?
One single bonding wire is more
CERN has quite a number of chips. One single gold bonding wire in any of those chips (erm the chip in their packaging case) is more. The CPUs are connected to mainboards, both sides have gold layer on their contact. Probably each of those contacts is more. And to add on top: Does not decay faster than any human can comprehend.
This is indeed more a funny unexpected byproduct :D.
Fundamental law of the universe...
Nothing (or few) things come for free.
It's like the mythical Perpetual Motion Machine.
Though it has to be said in fairness that E=MC2 has a solid go at it.
"What you have created Percy, is some green."
You want gold and farts and science all in the same article? Some volcanos emit gases that contain measurable amounts of gold (if you could capture it all).