How scientists accidentally turned lead into gold
Modern-day science accidentally achieved what medieval alchemists dreamed of doing by turning lead into the tiniest bit of gold.
Scientists with CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, said they confirmed the change of lead into gold using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which can beam particles at close to the speed of light before they collide, but more often miss without touching.
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According to CERN, the brief and tiny transformation to gold happened through "near-miss collisions" between lead nuclei in the LHC.
The LHC contains four detectors, including one known as A Large Ion Collider Experiment, or ALICE. The team said ALICE measured the production of gold when they counted the number of photon-nucleus interactions resulting in the emission of zero, one, two and three protons, accompanied by at least one neutron. These are associated with the production of lead, thallium, mercury and gold. The results showed that Run 2 of the LHC, between 2015 and 2018, produced gold at a maximum rate of about 89,000 nuclei per second from lead–lead collisions at the ALICE detector collision point.
"Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points downstream, where they immediately fragment into single protons, neutrons and other particles," officials at CERN said. "The gold exists for just a tiny fraction of a second."
The amount of gold produced wouldn't make anyone rich because it was trillions of times less than what would be needed to make a single piece of jewelry. In terms of mass, the amount of gold was about 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g). One picogram is one-trillionth of a gram.
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Still, the long-awaited achievement is something to be celebrated for these tiny interactions and what the powerful instruments can detect.
"Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally," Uliana Dmitrieva, of the ALICE collaboration, said in a statement.
In May, the LHC at CERN began its third operating period, known as Run 3, marking the start of the 2025 campaign to unfold new science in particle physics.Original article source: How scientists accidentally turned lead into gold
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