Is it possible to turn lead into gold?

An picture of the ALICE detector, which researchers used to observe near-miss collisions between lead nuclei within the LHC.
| Photo Credit: CERN

In India and different elements of the world, some historical pure philosophers practised an enterprise referred to as alchemy. It was in some methods an early type of chemistry, however guided by less-than-scientific concepts of the time. One type of alchemy was involved with changing base metals like lead into gold. We know in the present day that doing this requires us to change the composition of the nucleus of the lead atom, which isn’t straightforward.

In a brand new examine, scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe have reported turning lead atoms into gold atoms for a fraction of a second.

The LHC is legendary for accelerating protons to excessive energies and smashing billions of them head on. But within the examine, the researchers energised heavy lead nuclei and had them cross shut to one another, with out colliding, giving rise to so-called ultra-peripheral collisions. Even although the nuclei don’t bodily contact, they work together by way of their highly effective electromagnetic fields, which brought about among the nuclei to break up. The crew discovered that when a lead nucleus emitted protons, it primarily grew to become a gold nucleus.

Also, present theoretical fashions may solely roughly predict these emissions: the researchers mentioned this was as a result of their fashions tended to underestimate how usually one or two protons have been emitted. In different phrases, scientists have room to enhance their understanding of how these electromagnetic breakups work.