Scientists obtain unstable gold from lead, practical use uncertain

The Mainichi

28-06-2025

GENEVA (Kyodo) -- A team of scientists including those from Asian countries has successfully transformed lead into gold, though it disappeared in microseconds, with the discovery published in a U.S. physics magazine last month.
The team's spokesperson at CERN, a research organization on the Swiss-French border, said that although it was only an experimental finding, it could help advance human knowledge and enable the development of advanced equipment in the future.
Four experiments conducted between 2015 and 2018 at CERN, formally known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, yielded the results.
The team, which included scientists from India, South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia and Thailand, studied what happens when two lead nuclei come very close to each other in a so-called near-miss collision.
After the lead nuclei moved at nearly the speed of light, they confirmed that some protons and neutrons were pulled out of the core part of the atoms.
During the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerating machine, lead atoms were observed to lose three of their 82 protons, resulting in atoms of gold with 79 protons.
Through such near-miss collisions, the team confirmed the change that produced up to 89,000 gold nuclei per second.
The result of the analysis, which involved a total of 167 institutes across the world, was published by Physical Review C of the American Physical Society in May.
Marco Van Leeuwen, the research team's spokesperson, said that the gold made in the tests existed only "for a short time, microseconds or even shorter," and weighed a combined 29 picograms. One picogram is a trillionth of one gram.
It would take "billions of years to make one gram of gold," he said, but noted that the scientists' work aims to enhance atomic research and may have private sector applications, such as in medical equipment that produces X-ray images.
Tatsuya Chujo, a Japanese guest researcher at CERN who participated in the experiments, said, "I was surprised and excited that gold can actually be created from special reactions."
"It means that we can basically produce any kinds of elements in the world by this simple and pure reaction using a world class accelerator," said Chujo, a professor at the Institute of Pure and Applied Sciences of the University of Tsukuba.