Neon

Neon is a chemical element; it has symbol Ne and atomic number 10. It is the second noble gas in the periodic table. Neon is a colorless, odorless, inert monatomic gas under standard conditions, with approximately two-thirds the density of air.
Neon was discovered in 1898 alongside krypton and xenon, identified as one of the three remaining rare inert elements in dry air after the removal of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide. Its discovery was marked by the distinctive bright red emission spectrum it exhibited, leading to its immediate recognition as a new element. The name neon originates from the Greek word νέον, a neuter singular form of νέος, meaning 'new'. Neon is a chemically inert gas; although neon compounds do exist, they are primarily ionic molecules or fragile molecules held together by van der Waals forces.
The synthesis of most neon in the cosmos resulted from the nuclear fusion within stars of oxygen and helium through the alpha-capture process. Despite its abundant presence in the universe and Solar System—ranking fifth in cosmic abundance following hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon—neon is comparatively scarce on Earth. It constitutes about 18.2 ppm of Earth's atmospheric volume and a lesser fraction in the Earth's crust. The high volatility of neon and its inability to form compounds that would anchor it to solids explain its limited presence on Earth and the inner terrestrial planets. Neon's high volatility facilitated its escape from planetesimals under the early Solar System's nascent Sun's warmth.
Neon's notable applications include its use in low-voltage neon glow lamps, high-voltage discharge tubes, and neon advertising signs, where it emits a distinct reddish-orange glow. This same red emission line is responsible for the characteristic red light of helium–neon lasers. Although neon has some applications in plasma tubes and as a refrigerant, its commercial uses are relatively limited. It is primarily obtained through the fractional distillation of liquid air, making it significantly more expensive than helium due to air being its sole source.

History

Neon was discovered in 1898 by the British chemists Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers in London. Neon was discovered when Ramsay chilled a sample of air until it became a liquid, then warmed the liquid and captured the gases as they boiled off. The gases nitrogen, oxygen, and argon had been identified, but the remaining gases were isolated in roughly their order of abundance, in a six-week period beginning at the end of May 1898. The first remaining gas to be identified was krypton; the next, after krypton had been removed, was a gas which gave a brilliant red light under spectroscopic discharge. This gas, identified in June, was named "neon", the Greek analogue of the Latin novum suggested by Ramsay's son. The characteristic brilliant red-orange color emitted by gaseous neon when excited electrically was noted immediately. Travers later wrote: "the blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story and was a sight to dwell upon and never forget."
A second gas was also reported along with neon, having approximately the same density as argon but with a different spectrum – Ramsay and Travers named it metargon. However, the subsequent spectroscopic analysis revealed it to be argon contaminated with carbon monoxide. Finally, the same team discovered xenon by the same process, in September 1898.
Neon's scarcity precluded its prompt application for lighting along the lines of Moore tubes, which used nitrogen and which were commercialized in the early 1900s. After 1902, Georges Claude's company Air Liquide produced industrial quantities of neon as a byproduct of his air-liquefaction business. In December 1910 Claude demonstrated modern neon lighting based on a sealed tube of neon. Claude tried briefly to sell neon tubes for indoor domestic lighting, due to their intensity, but the market failed because homeowners objected to the color. In 1912, Claude's associate began selling neon discharge tubes as eye-catching advertising signs and was instantly more successful. Neon tubes were introduced to the U.S. in 1923 with two large neon signs bought by a Los Angeles Packard car dealership. The glow and arresting red color made neon advertising completely different from the competition. The intense color and vibrancy of neon equated with American society at the time, suggesting a "century of progress" and transforming cities into sensational new environments filled with radiating advertisements and "electro-graphic architecture".
Neon played a role in the basic understanding of the nature of atoms in 1913, when J. J. Thomson, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays, channeled streams of neon ions through a magnetic and an electric field and measured the deflection of the streams with a photographic plate. Thomson observed two separate patches of light on the photographic plate, which suggested two different parabolas of deflection. Thomson eventually concluded that some of the atoms in the neon gas were of higher mass than the rest. Though not understood at the time by Thomson, this was the first discovery of isotopes of stable atoms. Thomson's device was a crude version of the instrument we now term a mass spectrometer.

Isotopes

Neon has three stable isotopes: ²⁰Ne, ²¹Ne and ²²Ne. ²¹Ne and ²²Ne are partly primordial and partly nucleogenic and their variations in natural abundance are well understood. In contrast, ²⁰Ne is not known to be nucleogenic or radiogenic, except from the decay of oxygen-20, which is produced in very rare cases of cluster decay by thorium-228. The causes of the variation of ²⁰Ne in the Earth have thus been hotly debated.
The principal nuclear reactions generating nucleogenic neon isotopes start from ²⁴Mg and ²⁵Mg, which produce ²¹Ne and ²²Ne respectively, after neutron capture and immediate emission of an alpha particle. The neutrons that produce the reactions are mostly produced by secondary spallation reactions from alpha particles, in turn derived from uranium-series decay chains. The net result yields a trend towards lower ²⁰Ne/²²Ne and higher ²¹Ne/²²Ne ratios observed in uranium-rich rocks such as granites.
In addition, isotopic analysis of exposed terrestrial rocks has demonstrated the cosmogenic production of ²¹Ne. This isotope is generated by spallation reactions on magnesium, sodium, silicon, and aluminium. By analyzing all three isotopes, the cosmogenic component can be resolved from magmatic neon and nucleogenic neon. This suggests that neon will be a useful tool in determining cosmic exposure ages of surface rocks and meteorites.
Neon in solar wind contains a higher proportion of ²⁰Ne than nucleogenic and cosmogenic sources. Neon content observed in samples of volcanic gases and diamonds is also enriched in ²⁰Ne, suggesting a primordial, possibly solar origin.

Characteristics

Neon is the second-lightest noble gas, after helium. Like other noble gases, neon is colorless and odorless. It glows reddish-orange in a vacuum discharge tube. It has over 40 times the refrigerating capacity of liquid helium and three times that of liquid hydrogen. In most applications it is a less expensive refrigerant than helium. Despite helium surpassing neon in terms of ionization energy, neon is theorized to be the chemically least reactive of all the elements, even less so than the former. Multiple computational studies suggest that helium can form stable chemical species under extreme conditions. The helium hydride ion HeH⁺ has been experimentally observed, and high-pressure solids such as Na₂He have also been confirmed. Additionally, theoretical works predict that helium hydride fluoride, a neutral compound from HeH⁺ could be stable under extreme pressure, whereas the analogous neon compound HNeF appears unbound and therefore nonexistent. In contrast, no stable neutral or covalent neon compounds are known to exist under any pressure or temperature. While a neon-containing anion complex ^- has been predicted theoretically, its existence has yet to be proven experimentally, leaving neon as the only noble gas for which no compounds have been definitively confirmed to exist.
Neon plasma has the most intense light discharge at normal voltages and currents of all the noble gases. The average color of this light to the human eye is red-orange due to many lines in this range; it also contains a strong green line, which is hidden, unless the visual components are dispersed by a spectroscope.

Occurrence

Stable isotopes of neon are produced in stars. Neon's most abundant isotope ²⁰Ne is created by the nuclear fusion of carbon and carbon in the carbon-burning process of stellar nucleosynthesis. This requires temperatures above 500 megakelvins, which occur in the cores of stars of more than 8 solar masses.
Neon is abundant on a universal scale; it is the fifth most abundant chemical element in the universe by mass, after hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon. Its relative rarity on Earth, like that of helium, is due to its relative lightness, high vapor pressure at very low temperatures, and chemical inertness, all properties which tend to keep it from being trapped in the condensing gas and dust clouds that formed the smaller and warmer solid planets like Earth.
Neon is monatomic, making it lighter than the molecules of diatomic nitrogen and oxygen which form the bulk of Earth's atmosphere; a balloon filled with neon will rise in air, albeit more slowly than a helium balloon.
Neon's abundance in the universe is about 1 part in 750 by mass; in the Sun and presumably in its proto-solar system nebula, about 1 part in 600. The Galileo spacecraft atmospheric entry probe found that in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, the abundance of neon is reduced by about a factor of 10, to a level of 1 part in 6,000 by mass. This may indicate that the ice-planetesimals that brought neon into Jupiter from the outer solar system formed in a region that was too warm to retain the neon atmospheric component, or that neon is selectively sequestered in the planet's interior.
Neon comprises 1 part in 55,000 in the Earth's atmosphere, or 18.2 ppm by volume, or 1 part in 79,000 of air by mass. It comprises a smaller fraction in the crust. It is industrially produced by cryogenic fractional distillation of liquefied air.
On 17 August 2015, based on studies with the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft, NASA scientists reported the detection of neon in the exosphere of the moon.