Noble gases overview

Greenwood, N. N., Eamshaw, A. (1997). Chemistry of the Elements (2nd ed.). Oxford Butterworth-Heinemann. Chapter 18 gives an excellent overview of noble gas chemistry. 

In this section we present an overview of the principal means available to sample mantle-derived noble gases, followed by a summary of their main isotope and relative abundance characteristics in the mantle. Mostly, the mantle shows a wide range in noble gas isotope variations serving to impart information on a variety of topics. The only exception is krypton whose isotopic composition is steadfastly air-like in mantle materials. Consequently, we do not consider krypton in this review. 

K.O. Christe (2001) Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 40, p. 1419 - An overview of recent developments A renaissance in noble gas chemistry . 

This chapter provides an overview of available noble gas data for solar system bodies apart from the Earth, Mars, and asteroids. Besides the Sun, the Moon, and the giant planets, we will also discuss data for the tenuous atmospheres of Mercury and the Moon, comets, interplanetary dust particles and elementary particles in the interplanetary medium and beyond. In addition, we summarize the scarce data base for the Venusian atmosphere. The extensive meteorite data from Mars and asteroidal sources are discussed in chapters in this volume by Ott (2002), Swindle (2002a,b) and Wieler (2002). Data from the Venusian and Martian atmospheres are discussed in more detail in chapters by Pepin and Porcelli (2002) and Swindle (2002b). Where appropriate, we will also present some data for other highly volatile elements such as H or N. 

The solar system is filled with elementary particles of various origins. The dominant source is the Sun and we have extensively discussed in this chapter noble gases from the solar corpuscular radiation (Sun and Moon sections). Here we discuss galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles, pick-up ions of interstellar or interplanetary origin, and anomalous cosmic rays. A recent overview is provided in a conference proceedings volume (Wimmer-Schweingruber 2001). A summary of the noble gas data is given in Table 13. 

Table 1. Some properties of important trapped noble gas eomponents—an overview (solar gases and Martian meteorites exeluded).

Several books (Alexander and Ozima 1978 Ozima and Podosek 2002 Mamyrin and Tolstikhin 1984 Matsuda 1994) and review articles (Craig and Lupton 1981 Lupton 1983 Farley and Neroda 1998 Ozima 1994 McDougall and Honda 1998) currently provide a comprehensive background to terrestrial noble gas geochemistry. The aim of this chapter is to provide an up-to-date overview of key observations on noble gas isotopes in ocean ridge and island basalts that bear on models for the composition and evolution of the Earth s mantle (e.g., see the chapter by Porcelli and Ballentine 2002, this volume). 

Abstract A brief overview is given for a variety of sensors for the detection of chemical warfare agents (CWA) semiconductor thick- or thin-fihn gas sensors with oxide and noble metal additives, surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors with a polymer membrane, and an ion mobility sensor (IMS). This is followed by discussion on the preparation methods for the sensing materials employed in semiconducting devices, and SAW sensors are introduced.The chapter closes with the results and observations from the examination and study of these devices. 

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