Neon (Ne)

Neon is a colorless and odorless monoatomic inert gas.
Together with Helium, it constitutes a subgroup of light inert gases. It is 1.44 times lighter than air, almost 2 times lighter than Argon, but 5 times heavier than Helium. In terms of the complex of properties, it is closer to Helium than to Argon.
Its existence was predicted twice: in 1897, Scottish chemist and physicist Sir William Ramsay gave a talk in Toronto entitled «Undiscovered Gas». «Don’t you think there is room for gaseous elements at the end of the first column of the periodic table, i.e. between halogens and alkali metals?» This is a quotation from a letter from William Ramsay to John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh. Two years earlier, the existence of a gaseous element with an atomic weight of 20 had been predicted by the French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, albeit in less detail.
Neon was discovered in June 1898 by English chemists William Ramsay and Maurice William Travers. It was named «after» the Greek word neos, which means «new».
The chemical inertness of Neon is exceptional. In this, only Helium can compete with it. So far not a single valence compound has been obtained, and clathrate compounds of Neon with water, hydroquinone and other substances (similar compounds of heavy noble gases – Radon, Xenon, Krypton, and even Argon – are widely known) are difficult to obtain and preserve.
Neon has been involved in at least two important scientific discoveries. It was on his example in 1913 that Sir Joseph John Thomson first established the existence of isotopes in a stable element. And in 1964 with the help of Neon at the large Dubna cyclotron, element No. 104, “Kurchatoviy”, was first obtained and discovered.

An interesting fact.

In December 1910, the French chemical engineer, inventor and the founder of Air Liquide company in the production of technical gases Georges Claude made the first neon-filled discharge lamp, which marked the beginning of Neon advertising.

Scopes of Neon:

• liquid Neon is used as a cooler in cryogenic plants;
• to provide an inert environment in the manufacture of semiconductors;
• gas-discharge and signal lamps are filling with Neon, and in radio-technical equipment – photocells, rectifiers;
• a mixture of Neon and Helium is used as a working medium in gas lasers (helium-neon laser);
• tubes filled with a mixture of Neon and Nitrogen, when an electric discharge is passed through them, give a red-orange glow, and therefore, they are widely used in advertising;
• in medicine, free radicals are frozen in the liquid substance of Neon and animal tissue is preserved;
• together with Xenon, used in electronics to produce plasma panels;
• in the chemical industry, the use of liquid Neon makes it possible to carry out direct synthesis reactions and to obtain Oxygen fluorides.

Ingas LLC gets Neon brand 5.0 HP, 6.0 UHP by the method of low-temperature distillation.