Nature Reports That Physicists Turn Lead into Gold

[Greg Bernhardt]

What do we think about this? Published in Nature. What could the implications be?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01484-3

 

[fresh_42]

It will not affect the gold price. They smashed some lead nuclei at nearly light speed and received a few gold atoms. Nothing sensational about it.

 

[phinds]

doesn't seem like something that is scalable or useful in any practical sense, but it is an interesting phenomenon in particle physics.

 

[Hornbein]

Ho hum.

 

[pines-demon]

Even if it was scalable, gold seller would claim it makes no difference. It is like diamonds, we can now synthesise diamonds relatively easily and with high purity, diamond prices have barely changed because lab diamonds are not "real diamonds" (according to jewelers).

 

[Hornbein]

Diamonds are not all that rare. The price is maintained by a cartel.

 

[OmCheeto]

As an ex-nuke, this sounded too familiar. A quick google and I found that wiki claims it was 101 years ago that someone converted something into gold.

The first synthesis of gold was conducted by Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka, who synthesized gold from mercury in 1924 by neutron bombardment.

{ref: search for 'synthesis'}

Given that no one has turned this into a money maker makes me think that it's just not worth it.
Fun idea though.

One of the problems is that of all the isotopes of gold, only one is stable, ie. non-radioactive.
{ref: chart of the nuclides}

 

[QuarkyMeson]

We've transmuted gold from other materials for a while now, its just that it isn't economical for the yields produced.

It is known that gold isotopes are produced in nuclear reactions induced by low-energy neutrons, protons, deuterons and photons on Hg, Au, and Pt targets (see Ref. [40] for a review). Gold isotopes were also produced in the fragmentation of target 209Bi nuclei induced by high-energy beams of 12C and 20Ne [41], and in the fragmentation of uranium nuclei induced by high-energy protons [42]. However, according to the Experimental Nuclear Reaction Data database [43], no data were reported specifically for the photonuclear reactions Pb*(𝛾,*)Au*. In the present work we report for the first time the production of gold in the photoabsorption by lead nuclei, purely in ultraperipheral 208Pb-208Pb collisions, with unusually large cross section comparable to the total hadronic 208Pb-208Pb cross section. It can be estimated that a total of some 2.9×10−11g of various gold isotopes were produced from both LHC beams according to the total integrated luminosity at all four interaction points during Run 2 (2015–2018) of the LHC. The Pb-Pb data analyzed in the present paper were collected in 2018. The transmutation of lead into gold is the dream of medieval alchemists which comes true at the LHC.

Although only fluxes of 206Pb and 207Pb from EMD that accompany the 208Pb beam and are not intercepted by collimators pose a risk to LHC operation [44,45], the production of other secondary nuclei still significantly limits beam lifetime and reduces luminosity. Thus, these new measurements provide also a valuable contribution to the study of beam losses due to electromagnetic processes at the LHC and future colliders.

https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.111.054906

The nature article is kind of weird and seems to have latched onto this from the paper. Honestly, you'd think the reviewers would flag that bit of fluff in the paper, but I guess not. This is the real point of the paper:

The first measurements of proton emission accompanied by neutron emission in the electromagnetic dissociation (EMD) of 208Pb nuclei in the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider are presented.

Basically, their analysis matches the RELDIS model in some parts and differs in other parts. That's the interesting bit. (For someone that is, I don't know enough to understand more than a superficial bit of what the paper is saying. As an aside, it's a little weird they give the model deviation in percentage, but maybes that just how they do things.)

 

[PAllen]

Even if it was scalable, gold seller would claim it makes no difference. It is like diamonds, we can now synthesise diamonds relatively easily and with high purity, diamond prices have barely changed because lab diamonds are not "real diamonds" (according to jewelers).

The cases are not the same. For diamonds, natural and synthetic are distinguishable (due to specific microscopic imperfections present in the natural ones). This allows a separate market for each. Gold just has a bullion value, so a separate marked would not be possible. In general, the gold bullion value is not controlled by the jewelry industry at all. If gold could be produced sufficiently cheaply, I believe it would collapse the gold market.

Of course, this method has no promise at all, in that regard.

 

[Baluncore]

If gold could be produced sufficiently cheaply, I believe it would collapse the gold market.

If energy could be produced sufficiently cheaply, I believe it would collapse the energy market. That is also a truism.

Only a self-destructive masochist, or an anarchist, would invest in synthetic gold, or free energy, as they would bring the markets down with them.

There is only one stable isotope of gold found in nature, 197Au. The presence of synthetic gold isotopes with half lives measured in days, and their daughter products, Pt and Hg, would make the synthetic gold identifiable for many years, unless it could be perfectly refined.

 

[PAllen]

If energy could be produced sufficiently cheaply, I believe it would collapse the energy market. That is also a truism.

Only a self-destructive masochist, or an anarchist, would invest in synthetic gold, or free energy, as they would bring the markets down with them.

There is only one stable isotope of gold found in nature, 197Au. The presence of synthetic gold isotopes with half lives measured in days, and their daughter products, Pt and Hg, would make the synthetic gold identifiable for many years, unless it could be perfectly refined.

Radioactive gold would certainly be a different and specialized market. Places that store e.g. the gold bullion backing commodity ETFs and similar, would absolutely not want radioactive gold. Nor would jewelers or most industrial applications. So, before it could be considered bullion, it would have to decay to minimal radiation level. At which point, refinement would be needed anyway to have the required purity level of 24k gold. At this point, the market would no longer distinguish natural and synthetic gold.

 

[BVirtual]

I read the amount of gold produced cost them around 2 million dollars. So, per ounce of this unrefined gold ore, and refining it, including some radioactive gold atoms, would be like 1 billion dollars per ounce. Making gold this way is not going to get many buyers.

 

[Baluncore]

Making gold this way is not going to get many buyers.

It would be impressive if the LHC could fund its operation through gold production, though I suspect that the LENR alchemy crowd are producing more gold, more economically, from the electrolysis of palladium in heavy water, than is possible in a particle beam. It will be interesting to watch the development of nanostructures in palladium for the storage of hydrogen, with spin-offs into alchemy, and the structured models of the nucleus.