I’ve just recently known from my nine years younger sister about that topic, and I’m not quite sure if I understand it completely, does this mean at some point silver can be transformed into gold ? .
In: Chemistry
If you want to smash it in a particle collider, sure.
Most chemical transformations DON’T change nuclei. They move electrons around, which creates different kinds of bonds. But the nuclei are always the same.
But if you manage to smash nuclei (or individual protons or neutrons) themselves together really fast (particle accelerator, nuclear reactor, or radioactive materials) you can change the nuclei themselves.
As for turning silver into gold, sure, but know that there’s a hard lower limit on how much energy this takes. This limit isn’t just an efficiency thing that better technology could improve, but as far as we know there is a certain minimum energy beyond which this won’t happen,* and it’s very expensive to get particles that fast. So this might not be an ideal get-rich-quick scheme.
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*footnote, for sake of completeness: Technically, since this is a quantum-mechanical effect, rather than just classical overcoming the classical Coulomb repulsion barrier, Gamow tunneling is probabilistic and could theoretically happen at lower energies. But the chances are so low as to be essentially nill.
Do you mean nuclear transmutation? Yes silver can created gold if you add the right amount of protons/neutrons to it. Nuclear fusion and fission are forms of nuclear transmutation.
Heavy elements are really only created in supernovae and such though.
It would be very difficult to turn silver into gold since they are so far apart in the periodic table. Would be easier to turn platinum into gold.
It’s called Neutron Activation. Expose a material to a flux of neutron radiation with the right energy neutrons, some of those neutrons will be absorbed. Usually this takes a stable atom and makes it radioactive, in which it will typically decay via beta minus decay where a neutron changes into a proton and an electron is emitted. The nucleus effectively gains a proton and the atom has transmutated into a different element.
A common stable isotope of platinum is Pt-196. Expose it to neutrons and some atoms will absorb a neutron and become Pt-197, which is radioactive with a half-life of 20 hrs. It will decay by beta decay into Au-197, the stable isotope of gold.
So in that sense you are effectively creating gold.
However, the cost of the platinum, plus the cost of the neutron emitter, plus the cost of the materials needed to complete this neutron activation process, you’re going to spend a whole lot more than the gold made is worth.
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