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The holy grail of ancient alchemy was a process for converting lead into gold.

(Well, for some alchemists, the true holy grail was, in fact, the actual Holy Grail. But that's another topic entirely.)

Have any nuclear physics experiments ever converted a measurable quantity of lead into gold?

This popular science article claims that in "the 1970s", Glenn Seaborg, Walt Loveland, and Dave Morrissey performed a nuclear experiment that converted lead into gold, and then published a widely publicized "paper" about it - but annoyingly, the popular article does not actually cite the paper.

But this popular article claims that "Morrissey and colleagues" converted bismuth into gold, and explicitly says that they chose not to use lead. The article claims that they published the results of their work in "the March 1981 issue of Physical Review C", although annoyingly it does not link to the journal article either. The only article by David J. Morrissey that I could find in the March 1981 issue of Physical Review C was this one, which indeed reports that bismuth was the input element.

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  • $\begingroup$ Try Modern Nuclear Chemistry by Glenn Seaborg, Walt Loveland, and Dave Morrissey. Ch 12.5.5 is on Synthesis of Nuclei with A > 60. The preview on Google Books did not show the contents, but you can get the book. $\endgroup$
    – mmesser314
    Commented Nov 5, 2023 at 18:55
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    $\begingroup$ Note that bismuth, unlike lead, is monoisotopic, which makes interpretation of any results much easier. Anyway, nuclear experiments of this kind are not an economic way to produce larger quantities of any element... $\endgroup$
    – user1079505
    Commented Nov 5, 2023 at 19:02
  • $\begingroup$ An interesting reddit thread from earlier in the year indicates that lead was not the only metal/element these "proto-chemists" were interested in transmuting to gold (basically any common metal was investigated). $\endgroup$
    – Kyle Kanos
    Commented Nov 5, 2023 at 19:32
  • $\begingroup$ And answers to this PSE question indicate it was done for sure in the 60s, but I didn't follow any links or references there. $\endgroup$
    – Kyle Kanos
    Commented Nov 5, 2023 at 19:38
  • $\begingroup$ @KyleKanos By "it", do you mean "transmuting from lead" or "transmuting from any common element". I already provided a reference to the latter in my question. For the former, I don't see reliable sources on that SE page. I was unable to find the paper that Owen claims to cite. Lubos's link leads to a "ThoughtCo." page that says "It's been reported that Glenn Seaborg ... succeeded in transmuting a minute quantity of lead (although he may have started with bismuth ...) into gold in 1980" - again, with no citations. This seems like a highly unreliable source. $\endgroup$
    – tparker
    Commented Nov 5, 2023 at 20:36

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What do you call a measurable quantity? What is certain is that the known means of transmutation (nuclear reactors, accelerators) cannot transmute all the atoms of a target material. And it is not possible to discern the atoms to be transmuted. At best, if you find the nuclear reactions that go well, you will get gold atoms mixed into a matrix of the starting material. Furthermore, another difficulty among many others, as soon as you form the first gold atoms, these in turn become target atoms which will undergo transmutations. So, completely transmuting 10 grams of natural lead into gold, no, this has never been achieved and is still not possible today.

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This transformation has been possible for quite some time. In a cyclotron, lead or bismuth is bombarded with protons or other particles. Different amounts of neutrons or protons or alpha particles are knocked out. Will be the nuclear spallation. As a result, various isotopes are formed, among which there will be a small quantity with a mass of 197, located on the green line in the figure (from this), which will quite quickly turn into the (nearly) stable Au197 (red square) through β-decay.

Table isotopes. Mass of 197 is located on the green line .

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