Wait... Did the Large Hadron Collider Just Do Alchemy?
For centuries, great thinkers of the Greco-Roman, Islamic, Medieval, and even early Enlightenment worlds investigated the possibilities of alchemy—the process of transforming base metals (i.e. lead) into 'noble' metals, such as gold. Intellectual heavyweights like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle frantically searched for recipes regarding the Philosopher's Stone, a legendary substance with the power to transmute metals.
Of course, nothing came of these investigations (other than the foundations of modern chemistry), but it turns out all Boyle, Newton, and the countless other intellectuals who pursued this alchemical dream needed was a 17-mile-long particle accelerator capable of flinging atoms at each other 99.999993 percent the speed of light.
You know, the usual.
In a paper published in Physical Review C from the team at A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), scientists detail how they technically practiced a little bit of alchemy— though not quite like luminaries of times past might have imagined. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to smash particles together, but the machine can also perform what's known as 'near-miss collisions.' Pretty much exactly what they sound like, these near misses are actually more common throughout the universe than head-on particle collisions, and the electric fields surrounding these nuclei can form proton-proton or proton-nuclear interactions as they pass by.
In the experiment, scientists created a near-miss collision with lead nuclei, which has a strong electromagnetic force due to its 82 protons. As the lead nuclei travels at near the speed of light, its magnetic field lines are 'squashed into a thin pancake,' according to CERN. This can produce a short pulse of photons that often triggers an 'electromagnetic dissociation.' This process excites the nucleus, which can result in the ejection of neutrons and protons.
Using zero degree calorimeters (ZDC) to count the resulting interactions, ALICE tallied how often lead atoms shed one proton (thallium), two protons (mercury), and finally three protons, which is, of course, gold. Although thallium and mercury were more common byproducts of this 'electromagnetic dissociation,' Run 2 of the ALICE analysis, which lasted from 2015 to 2018, showed that the LHC created 86 billion gold nuclei.
Sounds like a lot, right? Well, not really—that comes out to roughly 29 trillionths of a gram. These gold nuclei are also incredibly short-lived, only lasting for around a microsecond before smashing into something or breaking apart into other elements.
'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 said in a press statement.
According to CERN, the subsequent Run 3 produced double the amount of gold, but trillions less than required to make just a single piece of gold jewelry—probably not what ancient alchemists had in mind. However, ALICE isn't interested in finding some mythical transmutation stone.
Instead, this collaboration probes the physics that results from heavy ion collisions, which create gluon-quark plasma similar to what likely permeated the universe only a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. Tracking even these trace amounts of 21st century alchemy can be a big boon for future experiments and colliders.
'The results also test and improve theoretical models of electromagnetic dissociation which, beyond their intrinsic physics interest, are used to understand and predict beam losses that are a major limit on the performance of the LHC and future colliders,' ALICE collaborator John Jowett said in a press statement.
This past month, CERN completed a feasibility study regarding LHC's successor, currently named the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Once performing high-energy collisions by 2070, the FCC will produce science—and, as it would seem, alchemy—in ways beyond the wildest imagination of those famous fathers of modern science.
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