Image of the tunnel inside the Large Hadron Collider
For thousands of years, humans have lived with the dream of turning lead into gold. This process was referred to as "chrysopoeia" in ancient times, and people made numerous attempts to realize this idea. However, it was believed that accomplishing this through chemical reactions was absolutely impossible, as lead and gold differ significantly at the atomic level.
However, physicists at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) have achieved this process for the first time in history. This significant discovery was made with the help of the world's most powerful particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), according to Newsweek.
During the research, physicists accelerated lead nuclei to nearly the maximum speed of light (specifically, up to 99.999993 percent of the speed of light) and brought them close to each other to the point of nearly colliding. At the last moment, these nuclei moved away from each other, resulting in a photonuclear reaction.
As a result, in rare cases, lead nuclei lost 3 out of their 82 protons. Through this process, the lead nucleus transformed into a gold atom with 79 protons. Scientists observed that the speed of these reactions occurred 89 thousand times per second. However, the newly created gold atoms decayed in a very short time.
Through this research, scientists confirmed one aspect: theoretically, it is indeed possible to turn lead into gold using nuclear methods.
However, this discovery is currently only interesting from a theoretical and experimental perspective, and is considered very inefficient in practice. According to scientists' calculations, the amount of gold produced from lead is extremely small. To be more precise, the amount of gold created as a result of the experiments is a trillion times less than what is needed to make a simple wedding ring.
Interestingly, if the goal is to obtain one gram of gold, the Large Hadron Collider would need to operate continuously for a quadrillion years.
Therefore, scientists consider the idea of producing gold through this method to be completely impractical. At the same time, this discovery by CERN physicists is recognized as historically significant, marking another major step in humanity's quest to uncover the secrets of nature.
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