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Physicists Turned Lead Into Gold—for a Fraction of a Second | Instead of using the Large Hadron Collider to smash atoms together, researchers briefly turned lead into gold by facilitating near-misses.


Instead of using the Large Hadron Collider to smash atoms together, researchers briefly turned lead into gold by facilitating near-misses.

“The present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,” Uliana Dmitrieva, a physicist from the ALICE collaboration at CERN, said in an institute statement. While the latest experiment produced nearly twice as much gold as previous attempts, the fleeting quantity is still trillions of times less than what a goldsmith would need to make even a single piece of jewelry. “The results also test and improve theoretical models of electromagnetic dissociation which, beyond their intrinsic physics interest, are used to understand and predict beam losses that are a major limit on the performance of the LHC and future colliders,” explained John Jowett, an accelerator physicist from the ALICE collaboration who did not participate in the study.

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