The molar volume of silicon: Discrepancies and limitations

We offer a new representation of the silicon molar volume discrepancy by at tending to a previously incorrect accounting of the early work at the Natio nal Bureau of Standards (NBS), Removal of a poorly documented correction to the MBS density scale leads to a plausibly correct description of the mola r volume anomaly problem. The possibility of discrepant metrology has been previously ruled out by sample exchanges, This led to several materials cha racterization exercises that gave important null results as briefly summari zed here. We report the first nonnull results and examine their correlation with those samples with discrepant molar volume values. In the end, there is a reasonably optimistic prospect that concordant and accurate density va lues can emerge at an interesting level of significance (less than 10(-7)). A brief discussion of intrinsic limitations of melt-grown crystals is incl uded.