Is anything else on earth ever more pure than semiconductor grade silicon ?

[aceplace57]

germanium is used in semiconductors too.

Germanium

paste screwed up the quote. thats 10 raised to the power of 10.

Germanium is a semiconductor. Zone refining techniques have led to the production of crystalline germanium for semiconductors that has an impurity of only one part in 1010,[27] making it one of the purest materials ever obtained.

[Velocity]

Well, technically pure water is just H2O. I imagine there must be some way to make it 99.99999999999999999% pure.

[drewtwo99]

So when we talk about 99.999999% purity, are we talking about by mass or by number of atoms?

If it’s just by number of particles, there’s a hell of a lot of neutrinos “inside” any given material at any given moment in time.

[Mangetout]

@Velocity

Well, technically pure water is just H2O. I imagine there must be some way to make it 99.99999999999999999% pure.

The problem is that before you get to that degree of purity, water is dissolving bits of the container (or bits are diffusing at the boundary) - even if it’s something we conventionally consider insoluble, like metal or glass.

[Mangetout]

@drewtwo99

So when we talk about 99.999999% purity, are we talking about by mass or by number of atoms?

Molar seems the way to go on this, I reckon.