This particular source has been widely used due to its favorable characteristics, primarily the ability to deliver high energy output over a wide wavelength range. A mercury or xenon arc-discharge lamp is employed for fluorescence microscopy using a reflected light illuminator attached to a specially configured rear port.

Aperture and field diaphragms, along with neutral density filters, are accessed near the port at the rear of the microscope. Xenon lamps in fluorescence instruments can be operated in either the continuous mode or as flash lamps. There are a number of differences between xenon arc lamps and flash lamps in fluorescence detectors. Xenon lamps are the preferred source for general-purpose fluorescence detectors. Xenon lamp: This is widely used in spectrofluorometers.
For example, the life of xenon arc lamps can last up to 2,000 hours, which can be up to four times longer than flash lamps. The exceedingly high pressure of xenon lamps during operation (ranging from 40 to 60 atmospheres) broadens spectral lines to yield far more uniformly distributed excitation of fluorophores when compared to the narrow and discrete emission lines produced by mercury lamps. The other one is known as a xenon-mercury lamp.

The rotating drum uses a water-cooled lamp … The Q-Sun xenon's control system is illustrated in Figure 11. 6.3.1 Light source. mercury-xenon arc lamps.
Short-gap xenon burners are usually more desirable because the size of the arc … Here light is produced by passing electricity through ionized Xenon gas under high pressure. Excitation wavelength selection The excitation wavelength of choice requires some source-light filtering. The most commonly used light source for fluorescence microscopy is a mercury or xenon arc lamp (Nolte, Pawley, & Horing, 2006; …

Control of irradiance is especially important in a xenon tester, because xenon lamps are inherently less spectrally stable than fluorescent UV lamps. The mercury-xenon arc lamp in the FLR detector has the additional advantage of higher intensity at certain emission bands. The static-array removes excess heat by means of moving large volumes of air through the lamp housing. The mercury short-arc lamps commonly utilized in fluorescence microscopy are gas-discharge lamps that contain a mixture of liquid mercury and an inert gas (such as argon or xenon), housed within a glass envelope together with a pair of closely spaced electrodes.

The carbon arc light, which consists of an arc between carbon electrodes in air, invented by Humphry Davy in the first decade of the 1800s, was the first practical electric light.