Modern scientists managed to realize the long-standing dream of alchemists — to turn lead into gold with the help of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). However, it is impossible to get a financial benefit from this – very little gold is produced, and its existence lasts only a moment. About the results of the experiment reported European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
A team of researchers found that during so-called “near collisions” — when lead nuclei fly past each other at high energies in a VAK — super-strong electromagnetic fields are generated. These fields can knock protons out of nuclei, temporarily turning lead into gold.
In cases of direct collision of nuclei, a quark-gluon plasma occurs — a superdense and superhot form of matter that, according to scientific hypotheses, existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. However, much more often the nuclei simply diverge without coming into direct contact. In such situations, their electromagnetic fields trigger photonic and photonuclear reactions.
A particularly intense field is formed due to the high number of protons in the lead core — 82, each of which carries an elementary charge. In addition, the nuclei move in the HAC at almost the speed of light (99.999993%), due to which the electromagnetic lines are compressed into a narrow pulse of photons directed across the trajectory of motion.
This leads to a phenomenon known as electromagnetic dissociation — a photon hitting the nucleus excites it, causing a few protons or neutrons to fly out of it. To form gold, which has 79 protons, only three protons need to be removed from the lead nucleus.
However, the gold created in this way disappears almost instantly. To fix it, scientists used ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) — one of the six main detectors of the Large Hadron Collider. Despite this discovery, the researchers note that the amount of gold obtained is “trillions of times less than what is needed to make a piece of jewelry.”
