Geneva, May 13 — Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have succeeded in transforming lead into gold — albeit only for a microsecond — during high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in a modern echo of the ancient alchemical dream.
The breakthrough, detailed by the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) collaboration and published in Physical Review C, was achieved by smashing lead ions together at nearly the speed of light. The collisions produced intense electromagnetic fields, triggering a rare nuclear transmutation in which lead nuclei lost three protons, briefly becoming gold.
Between 2015 and 2018, CERN researchers recorded 86 billion gold nuclei formed in such events — amounting to just 29 picograms, or 29 trillionths of a gram — a quantity invisible to the naked eye and too fleeting to be recovered. The gold atoms existed for about one microsecond before decaying or striking the collider walls.
“This is a remarkable demonstration of nuclear transmutation under extreme conditions,” said ALICE spokesperson Marco van Leeuwen. “It shows how sensitive our detectors are — capable of analyzing both massive particle bursts and rare single-nucleus transformations.”
The experiment also generated small amounts of other elements, such as thallium and mercury, in larger quantities than gold. Though the process is not commercially viable, it opens new avenues for exploring rare nuclear reactions and the fundamental nature of matter.
Physicist Uliana Dmitrieva of the ALICE team said the detector’s precision enabled the first systematic analysis of gold production through these electromagnetic processes. The research highlights the potential of particle accelerators to probe exotic transformations, decades after the original alchemists’ ambitions were dismissed as fantasy.
