Physicists Get Gold from Lead

The dream of alchemists has come true - the detectors of the ALICE experiment, installed at the Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), have recorded the transformation of lead into gold. And this was done with the direct participation of Russian physicists from the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. One of them, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Igor Pshenichnov, two decades ago developed a theoretical model of electromagnetic dissociation (the disintegration of nuclei by gamma quanta), which made it possible to explain the mechanism of the formation of nuclei of gold and other elements as a result of the collision of colliding beams of lead nuclei at the collider.

A paper on how this happened was recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Journals. In it, scientists working on the ALICE detector gave the world a “recipe” for obtaining gold, free of charge, namely, they told about the measurements they had taken to transmute lead into gold.

Medieval alchemists noticed that base lead was very close in density to gold, and so they made many attempts to transform it into the noble metal by chemical means. This continued until it became clear that lead and gold were different chemical elements, and therefore chemistry was useless for transforming one element into the other.

Physicists came to the rescue in the 20th century, proving that different elements can transform into others either naturally through radioactive decay or in the laboratory as a result of bombardment with neutrons or protons.

Although gold has already been and will be produced in laboratories by irradiation with neutrons and protons, it was the ALICE collaboration that discovered the transmutation of lead into gold using a new mechanism.

— Igor Anatolyevich, please tell us what was the original goal of your work? — I ask the author of the core collapse model.

— The purpose of the experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider is to study the collisions of nuclei that result in the formation of quark-gluon plasma. According to the Big Bang theory, 14 billion years ago, this hot, dense substance 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.

In the ALICE experiment, it was noted that secondary nuclei are formed during electromagnetic interactions of nuclei, for example, thallium, mercury or gold, which at high speeds leave the main orbit and fall into the superconducting magnets of the collider, disrupting their operation. This is a very real technical problem that requires a solution. Our model predicted the rate of formation of such secondary nuclei.

— What is the essence of the work?

— At the collider, scientists studied primarily "head-on" collisions of lead nuclei. However, in much more frequent interactions, when nuclei simply fly past each other without touching, the intense electromagnetic fields surrounding them can affect the oncoming nuclei, knocking protons out of them. The model predicted that in this way, if only three protons are knocked out of a lead nucleus, it will turn into gold with a noticeable probability.

— And how many nuclei were obtained in the experiment?

— The ALICE analysis shows that about 86 billion gold nuclei were created during the experiments. In mass, this corresponds to only 29 picograms (2.9 x 10 -11 grams) of gold. Alas, their lives were fleeting.

Of course, the gold obtained in the LHC is not measured in grams - these are microscopic quantities, and jewelry cannot be made from them. But the fact remains - scientists now know the physics of its production.

Published in the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" No. 29520 of May 14, 2025

Newspaper headline: Fleeting gold