Physicists turn lead into gold in scientific first
Alchemists eat your heart out.
Researchers at CERN's Large Hadron Collider achieved the once-impossible dream of alchemists by turning lead into gold — but only for a split second.
The world's largest particle accelerator shocked the scientific world by transmuting particles of the base metal into the precious metal through a newly-innovated mechanism that utilized near-miss interactions, the organization said in a statement.
CERN experiments usually slam particles together at extreme speeds as researchers glean what they can from the split-second interactions of tiny elements in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the material nature of the universe.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider transmuted lead into gold using a near-miss of two nuclei of the base metal.
CERN
To manifest the gold nuclei, CERN nerds didn't slam the particles together — instead, they crafted a near-miss between lead nuclei particles, allowing the almost-contact to generate a transmuting electromagnetic field.
'The electromagnetic field emanating from a lead nucleus is particularly strong because the nucleus contains 82 protons, each carrying an elementary charge,' CERN said. 'To create gold (a nucleus containing 79 protons), three protons must be removed from a lead nucleus in the [Large Hadron Collider] beams.'
When the lead nuclei are accelerated to '99.999993% of the speed of light,' they 'pancake' and experience short-lived pulses of photons called 'electromagnetic dissociation' that can alter the internal structure of the particles.
'Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyze the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,' said Uliana Dmitrieave of CERN, according to the release.
CERN scientists measured 86 billion gold nuclei in four major experiments — which amounts to just 29 picograms of the substance and which existed only for a tiny fraction of a second.
CERN researchers said the amount of gold they manifested was too minuscule to satisfy the desired riches of ancient
alchemists.
misunseo – stock.adobe.com
'While the dream of medieval alchemists has technically come true, their hopes of riches have once again been dashed,' the organization wrote in the release.
The Large Hadron Collider is a 17-mile-long, oval-shaped tunnel buried 574 feet underground on the France-Switzerland border near Geneva used to research sub-atomic particles and the origins of the universe.
In 2022, scientists discovered three new subatomic particles — the 'pentaquark' and a pair of 'tetraquarks.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Epoch Times
11-06-2025
- Epoch Times
Physics Meets Finance: Theoretical Consequences of Man-Made Gold
Commentary In a remarkable feat of modern physics, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have managed to recreate one of humanity's oldest fantasies:
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Yahoo
Protect LIGO's science and local impact from Trump's budget cuts
The Trump administration wants to slash funding for America's two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGOs) as part of broader cuts to the National Science Foundation. That would be a devastating blow to the nation's global leadership in scientific research. When Congress writes its fiscal 2026 budget, it should ignore the president's anti-science request. One of the LIGO sites is on the Hanford nuclear site. The other is in Louisiana. The White House proposes cutting 40% of their funding – $48 million to $29 million. And it also dictates how that cut should be made. It wants one of the two sites shut down. Given that Washington is a blue state that is participating in multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration and Louisiana is a red state that voted for the president, the odds of LIGO Hanford surviving seem low. Either way, scientists' ability to explore the universe by detecting gravitational waves would suffer significantly. Shutting one site down would compromise scientists' ability to verify detections of cosmic events and weed out false readings originating from local disturbances. It also would prevent the two sites from triangulating where an event occurred in the sky, allowing telescopes that rely on light for observations to also find and research them. The two LIGOs work in tandem. In 2015, the Hanford observatory and its sibling in Louisiana detected gravitational waves for the first time when they measured the ripple in space-time caused by two black holes merging 1.4 billion light-years away. The findings provided fresh confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and earned researchers a Nobel Prize in physics. Since then, LIGO has detected hundreds of events, including black holes merging and neutron stars colliding. The Hanford site continues to refine its tools and push science forward. An upgrade a couple of years ago installed quantum squeezing technology that allows scientists to detect 60% more events and probe a larger volume of space. If funded, the observatories will continue to help humanity answer profound questions about the universe. Projects like LIGO are expensive. The National Science Foundation has spent more than $1 billion on detecting gravitational waves over four decades. At the start, skeptics deemed it risky, but it has provided tremendous return on investment. It epitomizes the sort of Big Science research that few institutions other than governments can afford. Think Europe's Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project and the international Human Genome Project. Undercutting LIGO as it reaches its full potential and produces its most impressive results just to save a few million dollars would be a colossal mistake. As one commenter on the Tri-City Herald's website put it, 'It would be like inventing the microscope, seeing a cell for the first time, and then discarding it.' The best is yet to come. Even if a future administration were to restore funding, rehiring skilled researchers would be a monumental hurdle. A temporary shutdown will delay scientific progress and result in America losing ground to international researchers. LIGO has a local impact, too, and not just that it is visible from outer space. Its presence helps the Tri-Cities and the Hanford nuclear site evolve their scientific narrative from Cold War-era nuclear development to 21st-century astrophysics. It is a symbol of progress, diversification and positive global contribution that is invaluable for regional identity and attracting future talent and investment. LIGO staff go the extra mile by working with local STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. They speak in classrooms about science careers and explain the complex workings of the observatory in a way that young people can understand. An $8 million LIGO Exploration Center, which opened in 2022 and was funded by Washington state, further enhances that public-facing mission. Such direct engagement cultivates future STEM talent and inspires the next generation of scientists and engineers. The proposed cuts to LIGO would lead to an irreversible loss of U.S. leadership in gravitational wave astronomy and an immense loss to the Tri-Cities. The Trump administration must reconsider. If it does not, Washington's congressional delegation must convince their colleagues to preserve this cornerstone of American scientific preeminence.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Yahoo
Black holes could work as natural particle colliders to hunt for dark matter, scientists say
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. To unlock the secrets of dark matter, scientists could turn to supermassive black holes and their ability to act as natural superpowered particle colliders. That's according to new research that found conditions around black holes are more violent than previously believed. Currently, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but since it was used to discover the Higgs Boson in 2012, it has failed to deliver evidence of physics beyond the so-called "standard model of particle physics," including the particles that comprise dark matter. That has led scientists to propose and plan even larger and more powerful particle colliders to explore this as-yet undiscovered country of physics. However, these particle accelerators are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build. Fortunately, the cosmos offers natural particle accelerators in the form of the extreme environments around supermassive black holes. We just need a little ingenuity to exploit them. "One of the great hopes for particle colliders like the LHC is that it will generate dark matter particles, but we haven't seen any evidence yet," Joseph Silk, study team member and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. "That's why there are discussions underway to build a much more powerful version, a next-generation supercollider. But as we invest $30 billion and wait 40 years to build this supercollider, nature may provide a glimpse of the future in supermassive black holes." Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that seems to account for around 85% of all matter in the cosmos. That means the matter we understand — everything we see around us that's composed of atoms made of electrons, protons and neutrons — accounts for just 15% of stuff in the matter remains frustratingly elusive because it doesn't interact with light, making it effectively invisible. This is why we know it can't be made of standard atoms because these particles do interact with light. That has spurred the search for new particles that could comprise dark matter, with a great deal of this effort conducted using particle accelerators like the LHC. Human-made particle accelerators like the LHC allow scientists to probe the fundamental aspects of nature by slamming together particles like protons at near-light speeds. This creates flashes of energy and showers of short-lived particles. Within these showers, scientists hunt for hitherto undiscovered particles. Test particles like protons are accelerated and guided toward each other within the LHC and other "atom smashers" using incredibly strong magnets, but supermassive black holes could mimic this process using gravity and their own spins. Supermassive black holes with masses millions, or billions, of times that of the sun sitting at the hearts of galaxies are often surrounded by material in flattened clouds called "accretion disks." As these black holes spin at high speeds, some of this material is channeled to their poles, from where it is blasted out as near-light-speed jets of plasma. This phenomenon could generate effects similar to those seen in particle accelerators here on Earth. "If supermassive black holes can generate these particles by high-energy proton collisions, then we might get a signal on Earth, some really high-energy particle passing rapidly through our detectors," Silk said. "That would be the evidence for a novel particle collider within the most mysterious objects in the universe, attaining energies that would be unattainable in any terrestrial accelerator. "We'd see something with a strange signature that conceivably provides evidence for dark matter, which is a bit more of a leap, but it's possible.'The key to Silk and colleagues' recipe of supermassive black holes as supercolliders hinges on their discovery that gas flows near black holes can sap energy from the spin of that black hole. This results in the conditions in the gas becoming far more violent than expected. Thus, around spinning supermassive black holes, there should be a wealth of high-speed collisions between particles similar to those created in the LHC here on Earth."Some particles from these collisions go down the throat of the black hole and disappear forever," Silk said. "But because of their energy and momentum, some also come out, and it's those that come out which are accelerated to unprecedentedly high energies."It's very hard to say what the limit is, but they certainly are up to the energy of the newest supercollider that we plan to build, so they could definitely give us complementary results," Silk said. Related Stories: — Black hole announces itself to astronomers by violently ripping apart a star — Massive star's gory 'death by black hole' is the biggest and brightest event of its kind — Star escapes ravenous supermassive black hole, leaving behind its stellar partner Of course, catching these high-energy particles from supermassive supercolliders many light-years away will be tricky even if the team's theory is correct. Key to this detection could be observatories already tracking supernovas, black hole eruptions and other high-energy cosmic events."The difference between a supercollider and a black hole is that black holes are far away," Silk concluded. "But nevertheless, these particles will get to us." The team's research was published on Tuesday (June 3) in the journal Physical Review Letters.
