CERN Creates Gold from Lead and There’s No Magic, Just Physics

Image: The particle detector from the ALICE Experiment at the CERN LHC – September 29, 2013. Image credit: Johannes Vogel via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0. Article by Mihai Andrei. ZME Science – May 9, 2025.

For centuries, alchemists have dreamed of turning lead into gold. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they’ve finally managed to do it. There were no spells and no magic elixirs. It was just high-speed lead ions, flying and nearly the speed of light and barely missing each other. Although it lasted for only a fraction of a second, a team of physicists has now observed and measured this modern-day transmutation. This marks the first time that gold creation at the LHC has been directly quantified — and it’s changing how we think about what these collisions are capable of. […]

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