DIY excimers? possible?

[Geil]

do you think it is possible to make Xenon Chloride or Argon Flouride?

[Robby]

would those two gases react? Xenon and Argon are noble gases and are very unreactive.

[Laser Ben]

They are both widely used in industry for eximer laser applications. Your main problem is going to be not dying from the toxic gasses.

[Powerlab]

would those two gases react? Xenon and Argon are noble gases and are very unreactive.

That is true only in 'normal' state of gas. With electrical discharge, Xenon react with Chlorine, and Argon with Fluorine, respectively. XeCL and ArF are "dimers", which has relative short lifetime time as a molecule. When rest of the pulse excite such dimer, then this we call EXCIted diMER, or EXCIMER. There is also F2 laser, and they call it also excimer, I don't know why, because F2 is already molecule, so no true dimer. And, as "Laser Ben" mentioned, why to mess with corrosive and very toxic gases?

[jonsinger]

Hi.

Powerlab points out an important thing, but there is a terminology issue here. "Dimer" merely means "two molecules". Dimers are not inherently unstable; plenty of them exist in nature.

"Excimer", OTOH, means "excited-state molecule", and specifically refers to things that have repulsive ground states. For example, you can make KrF* (an excited state of Krypton Fluoride) by exciting a mixture of Kr and either F2 or NF3; but after a KrF* molecule emits a photon (or manages to lose its excitation some other way), the Kr and the F wander off in separate directions. (F is highly reactive, and rapidly recombines with whatever it can -- another F, for example.)

F2, Cl2, and various other stable molecules that have been lased in the same kind of setup are not excimers; but because the lower laser level is typically an upper level of the ground state and is rapidly depopulated [by collisions, IIRC], which gives a similar effect, people still use that term to describe them.

As both Laser Ben and Powerlab point out, F2 and Cl2 are highly corrosive and toxic. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to have anything to do with Fluorine, and Chlorine is no prize either. The other obvious problem is that Kr and especially Xe are insanely expensive. I recently saw a price of about $9,000 for ~100 liters of Xe. Granted, that much would last you a very long time; still, it's a lot of money, and the per-liter price goes up as the quantity goes down, so even a little bit is nasty expensive. Moreover, the preferred buffer gas (which you would need much more of) for both KrF and XeCl is Ne, which is not cheap in large quantities. Even if you don't mind the poisons, can you afford the nobles?

Finally, just because a gas is labelled "Noble" does not necessarily mean that it cannot form stable compounds. The heavier ones do. In fact, you can buy Xenon Difluoride in a jar; try searching on the word "xenon" at various chemical company websites.

Best --
jon