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Lead becomes gold for split second during LHC experiments
Several centuries ago, a branch of alchemy called chrysopoeia is said to have explored the possibilities of transforming widely available base metals into precious metals. Early practitioners never managed to pull it off, but it appears that in studying the conditions that emerged just after the…
Early practitioners never managed to pull it off, but it appears that in studying the conditions that emerged just after the Big Bang using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists have turned lead into gold – for just fractions of a second. When you have high-energy collisions between lead nuclei at the LHC that travel at almost the speed of light, it creates this quark–gluon plasma, a hot and dense state of matter that is believed to have filled the universe right after the Big Bang took place. The ALICE team used the detector’s zero degree calorimeters (ZDC) to count the number of photon–nucleus interactions that resulted in the emission of zero, one, two and three protons accompanied by at least one neutron, which are associated with the production of lead, thallium, mercury and gold, respectively."
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