Medieval alchemists were obsessed with the idea of turning lead into gold, a concept known as chrysopoeia. But they may have had more luck swapping out the philosopher's stone for a particle accelerator, new results suggest.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, have revealed that some 86 billion gold nuclei were created during the accelerator's second run, between 2015 and 2018 — all from smashing together lead atoms at 99.999993% the speed of light.
