Was demonstrated quite a long time ago, but is not really practical to get meaningful quantities out of it.
(That is why I always prefered physics over chemistry - my chemistry book in school started with the story of the alchimists and concluded that they were bound to fail as gold cannot be created.
And in my physics book was just the formula to create gold)
The place where this happens is in the liquid mercury target of the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge. Here, high energy protons shatter (spall) mercury nuclei, producing fragments that can include gold. An uncommon isotope of mercury can also be converted to gold by neutron capture.
you can build the entire neutron spallation reactor out of materials much cheaper than gold, and you can get unlimited quantities; the only impracticality is that the humans are still really bad at building machinery
It is quite practical. You just pour a big pile of hydrogen out, let gravity compress it until it starts fusing. Initially it will only create helium but near the end of the pile’s life you will get mountains of the other elements too.
Easy breasy. It just takes time and quite a bit of space and hydrogen. Much harder to scale it down of course. But think big and aim for a star as they say.
Because gold is so inert (a noble metal) its counterintuitive to see it in other forms eg in solution. In that sense manipulating gold in other forms than its elemental form probably feels like alchemy in common parlance.
I know aqua regia is relatively normal but I still find it weird to think of gold being dissolved
Quartz crystal array + electricity -> gold layers?
2 The concentration of disolved gold is lower in seawater than in hot hydrothermal mud.
3 Perhaps with realistic values, this is very low and even in ideal conditions ypu need a few thousands years to get a visible chunk of gold.
> Gold nuggets occur predominantly in quartz veins, and the current paradigm posits that gold precipitates from dilute (<1 mg/kg gold), hot, water ± carbon dioxide-rich fluids owing to changes in temperature, pressure and/or fluid chemistry.
I don't have access to the full paper but if they tested anywhere near those concentrations, it definitely won't apply to seawater. The amount of gold in oceans is estimated at 1 gram of dissolved gold per 100 million liters of seawater. The hydrothermal fluids that precipitate out gold in orogenic deposits are closer to 100,000 kg per 100 million liters.
This whole experiment is kind of nonsense. Orogenic gold deposits form under high pressures when tectonic plates collide, creating deep faults and shear zones and causign tons of hydrothermal fluid (at 200-450C) to penetrate those new cracks and dissolve the gold contained in them before carrying it all upwards. The chance that piezoelectricity plays much of an effect in those conditions is almost nil.
Several years ago I had read something similar about gold in underground water reservoirs forming along the walls based on … essentially earthquakes
