Chrysopoeia

In alchemy, the term chrysopoeia (from Ancient Greek χρυσοποιία (khrusopoiía) 'gold-making') refers to the artificial production of gold, most commonly by the alleged transmutation of base metals such as lead.

A related term is argyropoeia (from Ancient Greek ἀργυροποιία (arguropoiía) 'silver-making'), 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" (ἕν τὸ πᾶν, hen to pān), 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.