{"id":213753,"date":"2025-05-11T01:07:47","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T06:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/scientists-witness-lead-literally-turn-into-gold-in-the-large-hadron-collider"},"modified":"2025-05-11T01:07:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T06:07:47","slug":"scientists-witness-lead-literally-turn-into-gold-in-the-large-hadron-collider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/scientists-witness-lead-literally-turn-into-gold-in-the-large-hadron-collider","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Witness Lead Literally Turn Into Gold in The Large Hadron Collider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pQhbhpU9Wrg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>For a while, in the Middle Ages, there was a real craze for trying to turn unassuming lead into pure, gleaming gold.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps those ancient alchemists should have been building a particle collider. According to a new paper, CERN\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/the-large-hadron-collider-is-about-to-ramp-up-to-unprecedented-energy-levels\">Large Hadron Collider<\/a> produced about 86 billion gold nuclei from high-speed lead nuclei during the facility\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/the-lhc-is-now-colliding-lead-ions-at-record-breaking-energy-levels\">second run<\/a>, between 2015 and 2018.<\/p>\n<p>This is not actually much gold \u2013 mere trillionths of a gram. Nor does it last very long \u2013 just fractions of a second. But what\u2019s really cool here is the way physicists quantified the gold production: by counting the number of protons accompanying neutrons involved in the lead interactions using the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector\u2019s zero degree calorimeters (<a href=\"https:\/\/alice-collaboration.web.cern.ch\/node\/34995\">ZDCs<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a while, in the Middle Ages, there was a real craze for trying to turn unassuming lead into pure, gleaming gold. Perhaps those ancient alchemists should have been building a particle collider. According to a new paper, CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider produced about 86 billion gold nuclei from high-speed lead nuclei during the facility\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}