"Alchemy" comes true. A US company announces that it has successfully transformed mercury into gold.

Abstract:

Recently, the American nuclear fusion start-up Marathon Fusion announced its blockbuster experimental results.

They claim to use high-energy neutrons produced by nuclear fusion to bombard mercury, and use nuclear transmutation technology to convert mercury (mercury) into stable gold. The conversion rate is 10 times that of the previous record of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the "alchemy" that has been passed down for thousands of years has entered the laboratory from legend.

The ALICE team at CERN measured approximately 29 picograms of gold produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during its operation from 2015 to 2018. These gold nuclei came from four experiments and disintegrated in less than a second.

This technology is completely different from ancient alchemy. It is not a chemical reaction, but directly changes the structure of the atomic nucleus.

The experiment uses mercury-198 as the raw material. After the atomic nucleus absorbs neutrons, it transforms to generate radioactive mercury-197, which then undergoes electron capture and decay to finally form stable gold-197, which is the only stable gold isotope in nature.

The company also revealed that it has also completed the isotope enrichment test of a high-performance plasma centrifuge and is building a new generation of fusion equipment in San Francisco. In the long run, it envisions that future fusion power stations can simultaneously mass-produce precious metals and medical isotopes.

This company was founded in San Francisco in 2023. Its investors include Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy and Anglo American.

Its main business is the development of fusion devices and the production of medical isotopes. "Making gold" is just a demonstration direction of its nuclear transmutation technology

However, it should be noted that this achievement is currently only a unilateral statement by the company and has not been independently reviewed by a third party. At the same time, some insiders said that nuclear transmutation changing elements has long been established in physical theory and has been achieved in laboratories in the early years. However, the difficulty has always been to increase productivity and control radiation.