Friday 12 August 2016

conductivity - Does an electrically conductive gas exist at room conditions?


As I know, the gases are insulators, because their particles are mainly electrically neutral, and thus there is no movable charges in them.


But maybe it shouldn't be always so, for example if a gas has a significant proportion of charged particles, I think the electrical conductivity isn't impossible. If at least one of the electrons of its particles bounds very weakly, maybe even at room conditions is it possible to have enough low resistance to be considered as a conductor.



Am I right? Does a such gas already exist? Or there is some mechanism which prohibits this idea?


Extensions:




  1. Maybe a such gas could be considered as plasma, but I think from this aspect we could see the plasma as gas as well.




  2. I am thinking at around 1 atm pressure and 300 K temperature, in the gas, not around the box around it. Electrostatic discharge is also problematic, because in most gases it can happen only far from the room conditions and isn't an equilibrium state.





  3. If there is none, I am looking for the gas which is the possible nearest to the these 3 conditions (300 K, 1 atm, conductive).





Answer



The gas inside discharge neon lamp is not really hot. Also, think of St. Elmo's fires - these definitely do appear at ambient pressure and are "cold", i.e., normally they would not burn anything. But there is a catch: here we are looking at strongly non-equilibrium situations, caused by strong electric fields.


As for the gases which would behave like that in normal conditions, I haven't heard of such. Some compounds turn into plasma easier than others, but still that requires many hundreds °C. Among the easiest are complex halogenides like $\ce{KBF}_4$ or $\ce{KAlCl}_4$. At 1000K they may be not vaporized yet, but have some vapor pressure. Also, it's not like the vapors consist entirely of ions - no, far from that, the ions are still a minority, but that's enough to create some significant conductivity.


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