system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does an inert gas like argon prevent the evaporation of tungsten in a filament bulb?
gpt
A main challenge with tungsten bulbs is that they don't work in the presence of oxygen, as the extremely hot tungsten rapidly oxidizes, losing its electrical properties and crumbling away.

To avoid oxygen exposure, you can either make the bulb a vacuum or fill it with inert gas. Of these two, inert gas is the better solution since the hot tungsten tends to evaporate under a vacuum due to the low surrounding pressure.

So inert gas only prevents evaporation in comparison to evacuated bulbs, not because there is something inherently anti-evaporative about inert gas. But this is a very relevant comparison in the context of tungsten lightbulb technology.