Changing lead into gold has been the dream of many alchemists (and basically everyone else) for hundreds of years. According to research published in Physical Review C, that goal has been accomplished by the team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The team is running their ALICE experiment, which looks at what happens when heavy ions are smashed together at speeds approaching the speed of light. The primary goal of this experiment is to learn more about quark-gluon plasma, which was found in the time immediately following the Big Bang.

As part of this experiment, the team was shooting lead ions around the facility, and when they smashed together, they could actually observe them turning into gold.

Turning lead to gold isn’t nearly as hard at the atomic level as it is for large lead bars. Lead has 82 protons and somewhere around 126 neutrons. Gold, on the other hand, has 79 protons. So, all the researchers have to do is smash lead together at ultra-high speeds, and at least sometimes, three protons will be knocked off, turning it into gold.

Marco Van Leeuwen is a spokesperson for the ALICE experiment. In a statement, he said:

“It is impressive to see that our detectors can handle head-on collisions producing thousands of particles, while also being sensitive to collisions where only a few particles are produced at a time, enabling the study of rare electromagnetic ‘nuclear transmutation’ processes.”

Using a tool called a zero-degree calorimeter (ZDC), the researchers could measure the interactions between the various elements in the area and the interactions between high-energy light and the lead ions. With this, they could actually see the difference between times when no protons are ejected and when 1 or more break away.

When they send 174 billion atoms of lead into the machine, they can expect somewhere around 89,000 of them to be converted into gold every second.

Don’t travel to CERN to get your piece of gold, however. The amount generated is far less than a gram, and even that small amount can’t be collected because it is moving so fast that it ends up smashing into the sides of the particle accelerator, breaking the atoms apart.

In the statement, Uliana Dmitrieva of the ALICE experiment said:

“Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally”

The researchers aren’t doing this for the gold, so don’t expect them to try to adjust the settings in order to create the actual collectible amount of the precious metal.

It is nice, however, for scientists to be able to say that they have accomplished what philosophers and alchemists could only dream of.