🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr11.004156.19471@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes...
>
>>How fast can it turn bismuth into gold?
>>
> 
>    $10 billion is over a thousand tons of gold.  It had better be pretty
>    fast ...
> 

As a p-p collider, the SSC is poorly suited to this task.  (Note that the SSC
is not a p-pbar collider, as is often asserted.)  However, there will be a
small fixed-target program at much lower energy than 40 TeV in order to study 
p-nucleus interactions at the SSC.  In this configuration, it is possible in
principle to transmute lighter elements into gold.  However at these energies,
nuclei tend to get blasted apart by the incoming projectile.  You need a much
lower energy, say from a 100 MeV cyclotron, or the Bevalac, to have a
reasonable probability of the target nucleus absorbing the incoming proton
without ablating into nothingness.

-Scott