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Read desk. The world’s most advanced physics laboratory has succeeded in achieving what the mysticists ever dreamed – to convert one element into another, especially, transform the lead into gold.

But this conversion of modern times was not the result of ancient mantras or bubbling pan. It took place under a series of high-energy experiments conducted between 2015 and 2018 under a 27 km circle of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN on the outskirts of Geneva.

According to a recently published paper in Physical Review C, during this period, scientists succeeded in producing an estimated 86 billion gold nuclei, although it is about 29 pickograms gold – a trillionth part of a gram – a coin – is too small to make or even see, but still it is a magnificent scientific achievement.

This process looks like the science-story interpretation of the periodic table. The element is lead and gold on the chart, with 79 protons in gold and 82 in lead. Theoretically, by removing some protons and neutrons from the lead atom, you can get gold. However, this change requires vast powers, which no ancient can even imagine in the dream.

Enter LHC, which is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. There, scientists accelerated the lead nucleus to 99.99993% of light speed, making them pass fast with vacuum-seal tunnels. When two such nuclei passed close to each other, their huge electromagnetic fields collided with each other, causing an acute explosion of photons. These photons were powerful enough to destabilize the pulse nucleus, causing protons and neutrons to exit in the process called photodicistagation.

In this atomic destruction, some of the remaining particles joined the gold nucleus for a short time – a very short time and impossible rare. Most of the particles were destroyed in a few moments of colliding with LHC walls, but their construction was detected thanks to the highly sensitive zero degree calorimeter (ZDC) in the Alice (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector. The ZDC measured the emission of atomic fractions and converted this invisible alchemy into quantitative data.

And gold was not the only element born in anarchy. Conflicts also produced mercury (80 protons) and thallium (81 protons) – slightly less elements than lead on the periodic table. While in LHC experiments these were more abundant than gold, it was a symbolic and scientific significance of gold that attracted fantasies.

This achievement cannot begin a new era of gold mining in laboratories, as the quantity made is cosmicly small and exceptionally expensive. But it provides valuable information about nuclear processes that occur in extreme environments, such as a collision of supernova or neutron wires, where nature can do far more large -scale conversion.