Material Recommendations A colorless, nonflammable and odorless gas. A Simple asphyxiant Normal materials can be used. Xenon is used as a light source in special applications and an important application is as a fill for thyratron and half-wave rectifier tubes. Xenon occurs in slight traces in gases within the Earth and is present to an extent of about 0.0000086 percent, or about one part in 10,000,000, by volume of dry air.
Xenon is manu-factured on a small scale by the fractional distillation of liquid air.
The element xenon is used in lamps that produce intense, extremely short flashes of light, such as stroboscopes and lights for high-speed photography. Xenon flash lamps are used to activate ruby lasers. Study of the xenon-129 content of meteorites casts light on the history of the solar system. More than a dozen radioactive xenon isotopes produced by fission of uranium and other nuclear reactions are known. The oxides XeO3 and XeO4, made indirectly in aqueous solution, are explosively unstable when dry.