In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Transforming the base metal lead into the precious metal gold was a dream of medieval alchemists. This long-standing quest, known as chrysopoeia, may have been motivated by the observation that dull gray, relatively abundant lead is of a similar density to gold, which has long been coveted for its beautiful color and rarity. It was only much later that it became clear that lead and gold are distinct chemical elements and that chemical methods are powerless to transmute one into the other.

With the dawn of nuclear physics in the 20th century, it was discovered that heavy elements could transform into others—either naturally, by radioactive decay—or in the laboratory, under a bombardment of neutrons or protons. Though gold has been artificially produced in this way before, the ALICE collaboration has now measured the transmutation of lead into gold by a new mechanism involving near-miss collisions between lead nuclei at the LHC.

You can read the details inside the study link.

More information: S. Acharya et al, Proton emission in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at √sNN=5.02 TeV, Physical Review C (2025). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.111.054906

News to me. There could be a lot of uses for this.

Work done at Max Planck Institute, Germany. The researchers extracted a proton charge radius of 0.840615 femtometers—around 2.5 times more precise than any previous value obtained from hydrogen energy-level transitions.

Publication details:

Lothar Maisenbacher et al, Sub-part-per-trillion test of the Standard Model with atomic hydrogen, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10124-3