Chrysopoeia

In alchemy, the term chrysopoeia () refers to the artificial production of gold, most commonly by the alleged transmutation of base metals such as lead.

A related term is argyropoeia (), referring to the artificial production of silver, often by transmuting copper. Although alchemists pursued many different goals, the making of gold and silver remained one of the defining ambitions of alchemy throughout its history, from Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 300) to Robert Boyle (1627–1691).

The word was used in the title of a brief alchemical work, the ''Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra'' attributed to Cleopatra the Alchemist, which was probably written in the first centuries of the Christian era, but which is first found on a single leaf in a tenth-to-eleventh century manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, MS Marciana gr. Z. 299. The document features an ouroboros containing the words "the all is one" (, '), a concept that is related to Hermeticism. Stephen of Alexandria wrote a work called ''De Chrysopoeia''. ''Chrysopoeia'' is also the title of a 1515 poem by Giovanni Augurello.

The feat of artificially creating gold was achieved in 1980 with the carbon and neon nucleus bombardment of bismuth-209 atoms by a team including Glenn T. Seaborg, K. Aleklett and others at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2002 and 2004, the Super Proton Synchrotron team at CERN reported turning lead nuclei into gold nuclei through deliberate near-miss collisions inducing photon exchanges. In 2022, CERN scientists at ISOLDE reported producing 18 gold nuclei from proton bombardment of a uranium target. In 2025, the ALICE experiment team at the Large Hadron Collider reported producing more gold from the 2002 SPS team's mechanism at higher energies in the late 2010s.

Other images from the ''Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra''

Modern synthesis of gold atoms

It is possible to synthesize gold in particle accelerators or nuclear reactors, although the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold. Since there is only one stable gold isotope, ¹⁹⁷Au, nuclear reactions must create this isotope in order to produce usable gold.

Gold was synthesized from mercury by neutron bombardment in 1941, but the isotopes of gold produced were all radioactive. In 1980, Glenn Seaborg transmuted several thousand atoms of bismuth into gold at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His experimental technique was able to remove protons and neutrons from the bismuth atoms. However, this technique is far too expensive to enable the routine manufacture of gold.

In 2002 and 2004, CERN scientists at the Super Proton Synchrotron reported producing a minuscule amount of gold nuclei from lead nuclei, by inducing photon emissions within deliberate near-miss collisions of the lead nuclei. In 2022, CERN scientists at ISOLDE reported producing 18 gold nuclei from proton bombardment of a uranium target. In 2025, CERN's ALICE experiment team announced that in the previous decade, they had used the Large Hadron Collider to replicate the 2002 SPS experiments at higher energies. A total of roughly 260 billion gold nuclei were created over three experiment runs, a miniscule amount equivalent to about 90 picograms.

See also

* Magnum opus
* Philosophers' stone
* Nuclear transmutation

References

Works Cited

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{{Alchemy, state=expanded

Alchemical concepts
Gold
Silver