Can we make non-superheavy elements in a particle accelerator?

Right? I don’t know if it’s quite practical with the design of the current equipment as it is made to take singular fundamental particles within atoms, smash them together, and see what the littler bits and pieces are. Though Cern and others are known for using a lot of juice I was reading up a bit and it said that a lot of that goes towards running the surrounding facilities and processing of the data.

As a dude, I don’t see why the same kind of machinery couldn’t be used to grab globs or successive pulses of say, ‘half a gold’ or ‘half a tungsten’ . . .except that is supposed to be highly exothermic (like the sun) and, well, we would already have nuclear fusion annnnnd it looks like it’s not as simple as magnetic legos as far as existing nuclei are concerned. The dudes with the slide rules say that you have to make things sun-hot before nuclei will consider bonding. . . hmm—then again—if we can isolate individual protons and neutrons and zing them into collisions maybe they would reassemble into something interesting if we smashed enough of them in the same proximity. Beyond me. . .

Otherwise, it’s kind of cool to think about: if the guys with the slide rules are right anything that isn’t helium or hydrogen was created in the heart of a star or via supernova—soooo, you’re pretty much made of star-metal.

“Suver-heavy” is in reference to their atomic weight, not their “physical” weight.

Super-heavy atoms are usually very unstable, and tend to not exist or exist in tiny tiny amounts naturally. We use a particle accelerator to smash atoms into one another and make bigger “heavier” ones.

Yes, gold has been made. You start with materials with lower atomic number, and smash neutrons and protons into them.

Reading this again I think you may be asking why we don’t just do that, to make gold and silver and platinum out of nothing.

IF that’s what you’re asking, its because a collider takes a huge amount of energy to operate and create a microscopic amount of any element/molecule. Throw in the construction/materials cost and it really wouldn’t be worth it at the moment to make any of those materials.

Some day if we can make the process more efficient or cheaper somehow that may be of use. For the moment though it would be like me burning down my house to use the flames for making smores.

Particle generators can trigger nuclear fission breaking up heavy nuclei into lighter ones including gold and iron. We actually get more energy out of this, but it’s still not very practical because building particle accelerators is expensive and they handle only small amounts of atoms.

Creating iron from nuclear fusion is even more difficult. Stars can do it, but here on Earth we’re still struggling to make helium from hydrogen.

Haha – the real question for me this afternoon is how much gold is used in the building of a supercollider? :-)