The alchemists' dream come true: CERN transforms lead into gold
Antonio Broto
Geneva, May 9 (EFE) - For centuries, alchemists have sought to find a "philosopher's stone" capable of turning lead into gold, a transmutation that has finally been achieved, albeit at a subatomic level and in a fraction of a second, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
According to a statement from the institution on Thursday, this phenomenon was achieved through the interaction of lead nuclei traveling through the collider at 99.999993% of the speed of light.
The lead nucleus is particularly strong, containing 82 protons, but when it approaches other nuclei at high speeds and energies, photons are produced that can interact with that nucleus and expel three protons, achieving the 79 that a gold nucleus has.
The same number of photons are not always "ejected", which is why elements such as thallium (if only one proton is lost) or mercury (when two are lost) have also been created in these processes, but measurements at ALICE, one of the collider's expert areas, indicate that about 89,000 gold nuclei can be produced per second in these interactions.
Gold in tiny and fleeting quantitiesThis gold "exists only for a tiny fraction of a second," and the quantities produced are "trillions of times less than those needed to make a piece of jewelry," CERN clarifies.
The research center located on the outskirts of Geneva, near the French border, indicates that during the second phase of operation of the LHC (2015-2018), some 86 billion gold nuclei should have been created in the four LHC experimental zones, but that would only amount to 29 trillionths of a gram.
In the current third phase of the collider's operation (which began in 2022 and could end by the end of this year), it is estimated that this amount has been doubled, but the scale remains microscopic.
Shocks and friction"Although the dream of medieval alchemists has been technically fulfilled, their hopes for wealth would once again be dashed," the research center quips, whose leaders point out that these elemental transformations are of experimental, rather than economic, interest.
The lead-gold transmutation at the LHC does not occur precisely in direct collisions between nuclei of the former metal, but rather in the more frequent interactions in which they "graze" without actually touching, creating intense electromagnetic fields in which photon interactions occur.
When the collision is more direct, the lead nuclei can become quark-gluon plasma, a hot, dense state of matter that is believed to have filled the universe about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, giving rise to the matter we know today.
Between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD and until the rise of modern chemistry in the 18th century, alchemists of all ages attempted to transform other metals into gold, and lead was one of the prime candidates for this process called "chrysopoeia," due to its density similar to that of the precious metal.
Modern chemistry made it clear that lead and gold are distinct elements incapable of transmutation, although nuclear physics later qualified this idea by demonstrating that heavy elements could be transformed into others through radioactive decay or in the laboratory, under bombardment by neutrons or protons. EFE
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