Published : 11 Oct 2026, 12:21 AM
Updated : 11 Oct 2026, 12:20 AM
Medieval alchemists spent lifetimes chasing the impossible dream of turning lead into gold.
Physicists at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator have now done it -- though the result is far too small to see, let alone spend.
Researchers working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland have produced gold by stripping protons from lead nuclei during high-speed collisions.
The total yield: around 29 trillionths of a gram.
The science behind it is straightforward in principle, if staggering in practice, according to The Independent.
Lead and gold differ by just three protons -- remove exactly three from a lead atom, and you have gold.
The challenge is doing it.
Protons sit inside an atom’s nucleus, held there by the strong nuclear force -- one of the most powerful forces in nature.
To dislodge them requires an electric field roughly a million times stronger than those that produce lightning.
The ALICE team generated that field by firing beams of lead nuclei at each other at nearly the speed of light. In most cases the nuclei collide head-on and are destroyed entirely.
But in near-miss encounters, the fleeting electric field between the two nuclei becomes intense enough to shake protons loose.
When exactly three protons are shed, a lead nucleus briefly becomes gold.
The team used detectors called zero-degree calorimeters to count the stripped protons and calculate the gold yield indirectly.
At peak collision rates, the experiment produces around 89,000 gold nuclei per second -- each one vanishing in microseconds before hitting the collider walls.
The researchers also observed the production of thallium, formed when lead loses one proton, and mercury, formed when it loses two, reports The Independent.
Far from being a prize, the gold is actually a problem. Once a nucleus loses protons, it veers off its precise orbit and strikes the beam pipe walls, gradually weakening the collider beam over time.
But understanding the process is valuable nonetheless -- helping scientists make sense of their experiments and plan even larger colliders for the future.
