News from CERN

Medieval alchemists toiled unsuccessfully to change lead into gold, but physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had better luck – though for only a microsecond.

Alchemists used lead in their transmutation attempts since it was easy to find and because its physical properties are similar to those of gold. That includes atomic mass: lead has 82 protons in the nuclei of its atoms, while gold has 79.

Instead of alchemy, scientists used the world’s largest particle accelerator to crash beams of lead ions into each other at near-light speed. Some of the ions collided; others didn't.

CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, reported the results on May 8.

How does the collider make it happen?

In the collider, lead ions are fired at each other at nearly the speed of light, either hitting one another or passing close to others. Ions are atoms with positive or negative electrical charges.

A lead nucleus emits an intense electromagnetic field. In near-misses, a reaction known as electromagnetic dissociation can occur. The lead atom's nucleus vibrates and ejects three of its protons, in effect turning into a gold atom.

However, these “unstable, fast-moving gold atoms would have existed for around one microsecond before smashing into experimental apparatus or breaking apart into other particles,” Nature says.

What is the Large Hadron Collider?

The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, according to according to CERN, the organization that operates the collider.

It’s a ring of superconducting magnets and machines in a tunnel nearly 17 miles in circumference. It’s located about 575 feet below ground northwest of Geneva. It took 10 years to build and was completed in 2008.

One of its most significant discoveries was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that explained how elementary particles have mass.

It collides high-speed beams of protons and ions and allows researchers to observe the results. The purpose of these collisions is to recreate matter that’s believed to have filled the universe and about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, CERN says.

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Reuters; CERN; nature.com; space.com; NASA; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology