Xenon

By Donna Crane

54 Xe 131.30

XenonWhether it’s to light up the night

or to put you out like a light,Xenon is the element you needBuy it now and you’ll succeed.

Cost: $15.00 per gram

Donna Crane

Get it Now

• Xenon– Atomic Number: 54– One of the Noble Gases

• Every element wants to be like it!

– Atomic Weight: 131.293g– Exists as a gas in the environment

A Noble Gas

• It’s outer shell is full of electrons– Making it a stable

element. Not wanting to give away or gain an electron.

– It just wants to be who it is.

A Noble Gas

• Xenon and other noble gases had for a long time been considered to be completely chemically inert and not able to form compounds.

• In 1962 at the University of British Columbia, the first xenon compound, xenon hexafluoroplatinate, was synthesized by Neil Bartlett.

Characteristics

• In a gas filled tube, xenon emits a blue glow when the gas is excited by electrical discharge. Xenon emits a band of emission lines that span the visual spectrum, but the most intense lines occur in the region of blue light, which produces the coloration.

Physical Properties

• Density: 5.894 g/L

• Melting Point: 161.4K

• Boiling Point: 165.03K

• Heat Capacity: 20.786 J*mol*K

Other Characteristics

• Protons: 54

• Neutrons: 54

• Electrons:54

• Non Metal

Appearance

• Xenon is colorless

History

• Discovered in England by William Ramsay and Morris Travers on July 12, 1898.

• Found in the residue left over from evaporating components of liquid air.

• Named derived from the Greek word xenon, meaning foreign, strange or host.

Occurrence of Xenon

• Trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere, occurring at 0.087 parts per million.

• Also found in gases emitted from some mineral springs.

• Radioactive species of xenon are produced by neutron irradiation of fissionable material within nuclear reactors.

• Obtained commercially as a byproduct of the separation of air into oxygen and nitrogen.

• Relatively rare in the Sun’s atmosphere, on Earth, and in asteroids and comets.

• Mars shows a higher proportion than the Earth or the Sun.

Uses

• Xenon Flash Lamp – In 1934, Harold

Edgerton while exploring strobe light technology for high speed photography, pushed the time resolution down to a millionth of a second by creating an electrical spark inside a gas tube filled with xenon gas.

Xenon Flash Lamps

• Used in photographic flashes and stroboscopic lamps to excite the active medium in lasers which then generates coherent light, to produce laser power for inertial confinement fusion.

Uses

• In 1939, Albert R. Behnke Jr. tested the effects of varying breathing mixtures on deep-sea divers. He deduced that xenon gas could serve as an anesthetic.

• Experiments employing xenon as an anesthetic on a human were first made in Russia by Lahzarev in 1941.

• Xenon was first used as a surgical anesthetic in 1951 by Stuart C. Cullen, who successfully operated on two patients.

References

• http://www.elementsdatabase.com/Xenon-Xe-54-element/

• http://cn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon

• http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~koppen/discharge/