{"id":161453,"date":"2025-09-22T13:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T13:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/161453\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T13:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T13:06:08","slug":"a-physics-experiment-turned-lead-into-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/161453\/","title":{"rendered":"A Physics Experiment Turned Lead Into Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ALICE Collaboration is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for transforming lead into gold<\/a> for a fraction of a second and exposing the strange physics that goes on inside the Large Hadron Collider.<\/p>\n

The question<\/p>\n

What byproducts does ALICE<\/a>\u2014the Large Ion Collider Experiment at CERN\u2014produce when it studies matter at extreme energy levels?<\/p>\n

The result<\/p>\n

Many different things, but perhaps most interesting of all\u2014gold!<\/p>\n

In a Physical Review C<\/a> paper published earlier this year, the ALICE Collaboration announced that between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) created around 86 billion gold nuclei, each lasting for about a microsecond.<\/p>\n

ALICE primarily studies high-energy collisions between lead nuclei, whose charge is 82 times that of a proton. These large nuclei travel nearly at the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider, which slams these particles into the ALICE detector. These collisions produce a pulse of photon energy that chips away bits of the nuclei\u2014usually neutrons, but sometimes protons. When a lead nucleus loses three protons, it transmutes into element number 79, or gold.<\/p>\n

\"ScienceA visualization of lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, recorded by ALICE. Credit: CERN\/ALICE Collaboration<\/p>\n

This transmutation occurs around 50,000 to 80,000 times per second. Indeed, the program\u2019s \u201cgold production is quite copious,\u201d said John Jowett<\/a>, an accelerator physicist at CERN. \u201cHowever, on a human scale the gold production is very small. [Until] now we\u2019ve only created about, I think, 90 picograms, which is one millionth of a gram of gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those 90 picograms of gold disappear almost immediately after emerging, he added. \u201cSo this just reminds us\u2014I like to say to people\u2014how small atoms are compared to the scales we\u2019re used to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Why they did it<\/p>\n

The result didn\u2019t surprise any CERN scientist familiar with these instruments, Jowett said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t talk about it much before, but we knew it should happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists were also aware that this process had serious implications for ALICE in general, according to Daniel Tapia Takaki<\/a>, a physicist at the University of Kansas who led the CERN working groups for this project. Any particle that transmutes at CERN typically travels very long distances, meaning some inevitably smash into different sections of the LHC tunnel.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo they basically become kind of a safety hazard\u2014I mean, they at least start switching off the alarms,\u201d said Tapia Takaki. \u201cYou want to have a collider that\u2019s very stable\u2026 So understanding exactly how to mitigate this transmutation is one of the big priorities for the next generation of colliders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CernThe beam pipes inside ALICE. Credit: CERN\/ALICE Collaboration<\/p>\n

Uliana Dmitrieva<\/a> is the ambitious young scientist who kicked off a project to officially record this process in a formal, scientific manner. The task proved so gargantuan that by the time the paper made headlines, Dmitrieva, who had proposed the project as a master\u2019s student, had already finished her PhD and was preparing to become a staff scientist at Italy\u2019s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sounds really funny that there\u2019s some kind of alchemy at the LHC.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took more time than my PhD thesis,\u201d she laughed. \u201cThere were very few [formal] analyses of [these processes], and actually, I had to do everything from scratch, because it was difficult to model. There were a lot of bugs in [the calculations] because nobody had checked this before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why they\u2019re a winner<\/p>\n

All that strain proved more than worth the effort\u2014but in ways the team never imagined. The public attention for this project somewhat disguises the fact that gold production is \u201cjust a small part of the paper; the paper was mostly about proton emission and lead collisions due to these so-called ultra-peripheral interactions,\u201d Jowett noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was\u2026strange, because, okay, we just measured protons\u2014nothing interesting\u2014why is it everywhere?\u201d Dmitrieva joked. \u201cIt sounds really funny that there\u2019s some kind of alchemy at the LHC.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the team decided to lean into this angle, which clearly \u201ccaught the imagination of the public, and we thought it was a nice way to explain some of this physics,\u201d Jowett added. Overall, they were pleasantly surprised to see their project become an entry point to the grand scientific enterprise at CERN.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt made us happy but also humbled,\u201d Tapia Takaki said. \u201cWe have a responsibility to share the knowledge and the excitement\u2014and certainly, [creating gold] is very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next<\/p>\n

Now that the public excitement has cooled down, the researchers are looking to build on this data to further improve the detectors. That said, and given the large size of the project, there isn\u2019t a single, consolidated plan for the collaboration as a whole.<\/p>\n

Tapia Takaki wants to boost the collaboration\u2019s ability to make precise, systematic measurements of proton and neutron emission. With these results, he hopes ALICE\u2019s quirky particle physics can help tackle the most pressing questions in quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n

Jowett, who retired in 2019, now advises younger physicists, including at the ALICE Collaboration. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of research going on at the LHC,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very broadband machine that studies many things\u2014ALICE is just one part of it. This has given a few surprises. And I think it will continue to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team<\/p>\n

To say that ALICE is a big collaboration would be a tremendous understatement. With 1,886 members across 163 institutions in 39 countries, it takes a veritable city of scientists to turn lead into gold. A full list of ALICE Collaboration members can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ALICE Collaboration is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for transforming lead into gold for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[49,48,809,83885,811,820,314,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-161453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cern","11":"tag-gizmodo-science-fair","12":"tag-large-hadron-collider","13":"tag-particle-physics","14":"tag-physics","15":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}