system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Has anyone ever attempted to fuse heavy elements by artificial nucleosynthesis? What would make such a process difficult?
gpt
Yes, we do this all the time using particle accelerators. This is how superheavy elements are produced, for example.

The Coulomb barrier, the negative Q-values, and the kinematic thresholds pose problems for these reactions happening in nature. But with an accelerator, they're not an issue.

Fusion reactions are actually on the *low-energy* side of the kinds of reactions we can do with accelerators in experiments.