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Material World
Element · Xe

Xenon

The noble gas that anaesthetises without side effects, propels spacecraft, and produces light close to daylight.

Xenon is the heaviest stable noble gas and the most chemically approachable of them: xenon tetrafluoride, prepared in 1962, was the discovery that ended the idea that noble gases could not react at all. It is present in the atmosphere in vanishingly small proportion and is correspondingly expensive.

Its usefulness comes from being heavy, inert and easily ionised. A heavy atom is easy to accelerate and gives good thrust per unit; an easily excited one produces intense light in a discharge.

Uses

Xenon ion thrusters are the standard electric propulsion for deep space missions and for station-keeping on commercial satellites, giving very high efficiency at low thrust — the approach that took Dawn to Vesta and Ceres.

Xenon arc lamps produce a spectrum close to daylight and were used in cinema projection, and xenon flashlamps pump solid-state lasers. Xenon is an effective general anaesthetic with an unusually clean safety profile, limited in use only by cost, and liquid xenon is the detection medium in several dark matter experiments.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

is used as

  • Medical imaging — application · as an anaesthetic and in specialised lung imaging

is produced by

  • Air separation — process · the rarest of the stable noble gases in air, and priced accordingly

is found in

  • Air — material · under a tenth of a part per million, which makes it the rarest thing recovered from air at scale

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing
  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
  • PubChem
    US National Library of Medicine · Mixed — aggregated third-party content, rights retained by depositors
  • NIST — National Institute of Standards and Technology
    United States Department of Commerce · US Government work — public information, credit requested

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Xenon back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Xenon → is produced by (the rarest of the stable noble gases in air, and priced accordingly) → Air separation → takes as input (the feedstock, and an unusual one in being free, unlimited and available anywhere — the cost is entirely the energy to liquefy it) → Air

Downstream — what it becomes