I’ve heard that often the silicon used in semiconductors has 11N purity i.e. 99.999…9 (Eleven 9s after the decimal). Is there significant amount of any other element or compound that has been purified to even higher purities ? For me significant amount means >10g.
How pure is the water in the big underground tanks that hold neutrino /exotic particle detectors?
How pure are the highest gem grade diamonds?
Gold in some coins gets four decimal places, and people really care about gold. I’d say silicone is the purest.
Any single atom of anything is by definition pure. I think we need to specify how much of a substance qualifies.
Over 10 grams. See OP.
In order to possibly have a purity greater than 99.99999999999% (but less than unity), you’d need a sample composed of more than 10,000,000,000,000 atoms/molecules (although this is far less than the 10-gram limit imposed by the OP).
Diamonds are mostly formed by kimberlites and have significant amounts of non-carbon elements in them. Synthetic diamonds usually also contain impurities (on purpose), such as nitrogen for yellow.
My hatred for the New York Yankees.
Sure, but saying that’s far less than the 10g limit is a bit of an understatement. If I remember old Avacado’s number right, it’s smaller by a factor of something like 10,000,000,000 (depending on what it is).
And does ‘11 N purity’ mean eleven nines after the decimal in 99.99[…]9%, or eleven nines total (including the two before the decimal when written as a percentage)?
+1
True. If 6.02 X 10[sup]23[/sup] atoms of silicon weighs 28 grams, then 10[sup]13[/sup] atoms will only weigh 465 picograms.
Nine (purity)
the number of nines is apparently the total number of nines in the entire percentage figure, including digits on both sides of the decimal. Something that is 99% pure is two nines pure; something that is 99.9% pure is three nines pure.
A related question:
Once they have purified the silicon, how do they measure its purity?
I was going to say “my innocence” but I like your answer better.
A quick search finds vendors selling ultrapure water systems with claims that residual metals are below 1.0 ppt, which would be 9-Ns purity, if I understand things right. Of course there might be some other contaminants, bringing the overall purity level down a bit, but we’re seeing a ballpark anyway.
This is a more or less off-the-shelf kind of product; I don’t know if specialized applications with custom hardware might get more pure.
Though in some ways this isn’t different from the OP example: evidently the big customers for ultrapure water are silicon chip fabricators.
How about fluorine? Or, more accurately, a cylinder of compressed fluorine? Fluorine is so reactive that it will react with any impurity leaving the rest as pure fluorine.
Possibly they do have some such means, but it’s possible that they just reverse engineer the number based on the methodology they use.
For example, if I mix even parts alcohol and water, I can tell you that it’s half alcohol. If I then mix half this mixture with an even part of water, I can tell you that it’s 1/4th alcohol. This method will continue to proceed down to 1/8th, 1/16th, 1/32nd, 1/64th, etc.
If they’re confident of their methodology and know what the percentile of change is per step/time, they can use math to determine the level of purity, rather than testing.
Chemically reacting with something does not make the atoms that composed that something disappear. If X dissolves any Y that is around, your X becomes more contaminated with Y, not less so.
I imagine that fairly soon, graphene will be produced in “large” quantities. That’s pure carbon rings connected to each other. Otherwise, it’s not graphene.
Completely missed that. Sorry :smack: