In the LHC particle accelerator made the passage (for a fraction of a second) from lead to gold. Thanks to a new mechanism.
Transform a vile metal like lead golden: the scientists of CERN made the dream chased by medieval alchemists – albeit for very short moments – thanks to a new mechanism based on Collings missed between lead atoms within the Large Hadron Collider. The results of the experiment were published in the magazine Physical Review C.
A third way. Nuclear physics has already shown that heavy elements can be transformed into others both through radioactive decay in nature and in the laboratory, under bombing of neutrons or protons. Now the scientists of the collaboration Alice del Cern have shown that this transmutation can also take place through A new mechanisma type of frequent interaction within the LHC particle accelerator, which provides that i nuclei of lead atoms touched without touching each other.
Emission of protons. The core of the lead atom includes 82 protons; That of gold only three less, 79. The electromagnetic field emitted by lead atoms is already particularly intense, but at very high speeds to which these atoms travel in the LHC, (corresponding to 99,99993% of the speed of light), the electromagnetic field lines of the lead nuclei are compressed in order to generate short pulses of photons.
Often, this phenomenon triggers a process called electromagnetic dissociationso photons can cause oscillations in nearby particles, destabilizing their internal structure, and causing the expulsion of protons or neutrons.
Disappeared in a breath. The removal of three protons from the lead nucleus leads to creation of a golden nucleus; By removing two protons you get a mercury core, two are expelled you have a core of talium. The results show that LHC currently produces gold at a rate of approx 89,000 nuclei per secondless frequent than the creation of Talio or Mercury. The golden nuclei still have very short life: emerging from very high energy collisions crash on the walls of the LHC disrupting themselves in individual protons or neutrons.
Invisible pepper. Gold exists only for a very small fraction of a second, and in quantity trillions of times lower than those that would be used to make a jewel – With all due respect to alchemists. As explained in a statement from CERN, “in the Run 2 of the LHC (2015-2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created in the four main experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to only 29 picograms (2.9 × 10⁻ 1.) ».
The context. The Alice experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is an LHC experiment in which the collisions between lead nuclei is studied, designed to study the conditions of a phase of matter called plasma of quark and gluons, which is thought to be existed immediately after the Big Bang.
The transformation observed instead took place in a less spectacular and less violent process, made of barely touched collisions.
