Science & Technology

Large Hadron Collider turns lead into gold... for a fraction of a second

By T.K. Randall
May 12, 2025 ·  4 comments

The Large Hadron Collider. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Julian Herzog For centuries, alchemists around the world were obsessed with the practice of turning lead into gold - an achievement that they hoped would make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Now it turns out that modern science has actually figured out how to achieve exactly this, albeit in a way that is unlikely to make anyone wealthy anytime soon.

According to the findings of a new study, between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider - the world's largest particle accelerator - created 86 billion gold nuclei while running experiments that saw lead atoms being smashed together at 99.999993% the speed of light.While this might sound like a lot of gold, in total it amounts to a mere 29 trillionths of a gram.

Not only that, but it was then destroyed within a fraction of a second of being created.

"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 rare electromagnetic 'nuclear transmutation' processes," said Marco van Leeuwen - a spokesperson for ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment).

Source: Live Science | Comments (4)

Tags: Alchemy, Large Hadron Collider