Xenon

Xenon
Xenon is a noble gas that for decades people have thought it was not a relevant element and it was being considered as inert for its few reactions. Xenon was discovered in 1898 by the scientists Sir William Ramsay and Morris M. Travers, a professor of chemistry at the University College in London and his student, respectively. “They used a refrigeration machine to first produce liquid air.Applying a technique called fractional distillation. They then allowed the liquid air to warm up gradually and collected components that boiled off at different temperatures” (1). In this way, they identified three new elements, neon, krypton, and xenon in only three months. The name Xenon comes from the Greek word for stranger.
Xenon is contained in the p-block because in its ground state, thehighest energy electron is in the p-orbital. This element in found in the fifth period (row) and in the group 18 (column) in the Periodic Table of the Elements. Also, Xenon has the CAS Registry ID: 7440-63-3 (2.1). Xenon is a gas which is used in making electron tubes, as well as bactericidal lamps. Recently, this gas has been replacing the halogen in the headlights of cars because it is moreefficient and brighter. Also, Xenon has been used to detect radiation (3). In Medicine, Dr. Robert Sanders states about his discoveries on Xenon, “The ‘noble’ gases have been known to have anesthetic properties for 50 years yet only recently has their application become a clinical reality… Xenon demonstrates advantages over the other anesthetics including safety, beneficial pharmacokinetics,cardiovascular stability, analgesia, and neuro-protection” (4). Also, several isotopes of this element are used for cancer treatment and magnetic resonance imaging.
The estimated abundance in the earth’s crust and in the ocean is of 3.0 x 10-5 milligrams per kilograms and 5.0 x 10-5 milligrams per liter, respectively. Also, it is present in the Martian atmosphere as gas in about 0.08 ppm (2.2). It isknown by Raymond Chang that isotopes are “atoms that have the same atomic number but different mass numbers” (1.2). These atoms depending of their characteristics from the original element can have from insignificant to very harmful properties such as being the nuclear reactors in atomic bombs. There are nine known stable and 20 unstable isotopes for this noble gas which seven of them are used inthe medical field. There are a few isotopes that are radioactive and others that are used to create radioactive atoms of other elements. Winter states about the most relevant isotopes of Xenon,
Xe-124 is used in the production of two radioisotopes: I-123 and I-125. I-123 is used extensively in diagnostic procedures while I-125 is used in the treatment of prostate cancer. Hyperpolarized Xe-129 isused in the magnetic resonance imaging of gas flows in the lungs. Xe-136 has been proposed as a detector for neutrinoless double Beta decay research. Xe-126 can be used as a target for the production of radioactive Ba-128. (2.3)
This noble gas has the symbol Xe and the atomic number 54. It is a colorless, odorless, inert gas with the atomic weight of 131.293 and its standard state is as a gas.Xenon has a melting point of 161.36 K and a boiling point of 165.03 K. It has been classified as a non-metal and is found in the fifth period in the periodic table. Also, it is located in the group 18 in the Periodic Table of the Elements2.4.
Xenon does not make ionic bonds but it does make covalent bonds. The atomic radius of Xenon is 108pm from the nucleus to its outer valence shell. Thecovalent radius is 140pm and its Van der Waals radius is 216pm. The bond length in a Xenon-Xenon compound is of 439pm and the enthalpy of the compound is 6.53 ± 0.29 kJ mol-1. Some bonds can be shorter due to multiple bonding with the atom2.5.
Chang defines electronegativity as, “the ability of an atom to attract toward itself the electrons in a chemical bond (1.3).” The electronegativity of Xenon...