In a breakthrough that would make medieval alchemists envious, scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold. The team created about 86 billion gold atoms in a period from 2015 to 2018. However, each atom only existed for a fraction of a second before breaking apart. The machine can create about 89,000 gold atoms every second, but this is still far from practical use.
Researchers used a unique way to create gold by looking at what happens when lead atoms barely miss each other. Powerful electromagnetic fields around the atoms caused them to change into different elements. This discovery helps scientists understand how particles behave and improve future particle colliders.
The research isn’t just about making gold; it’s also about understanding how particles interact and improving theoretical models of electromagnetic dissociation. These findings can be used to predict beam losses, a major limit on the performance of the LHC and future colliders.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/scientists-turn-lead-gold-1st-time-split/story?id=121762241