What bond\crystal has the most regular pattern (i.e. least irregularities)? [closed]








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*Salt* is a famous regularly repeating cubic crystal, but there are always natural deformities and flaws present. I have heard that graphene is an extremely uniform substance. **With these in mind,**  
 **what is the most regular crystal pattern, natural or man-made?**




In nature you need to look for precious gamestones and then do optical selection (diamante and ruby would be good candidates). The same would be true for synthetics but of course as mentioned by Jon you can also take elements (Si, Ge). General rule: they should be hard (smaller chance that pressure will affect structure, by pressure I mean also your tools) and you need to grow them slowly.


*btw* it's hard to call graphen crystal pattern -- it's 2D.


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The electronics industry requires extremely pure crystalline silicon to make the silicon wafers on which most electronics products are based. Too many impurities ruin the chips made with the wafers. Therefore, the industry has developed good techniques to make very pure, defect free (or, more accurately, with very few defects) crystals.


[Zone refining](http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Zone_melting#/overview) is a key technique used to achieve large, pure silicon crystals in the semiconductor industry. Impurities can be reduced to parts per trillion and defects in the resulting crystal structures are also very low.


Currently [scientists are trying to redefine the kilogram](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14229-roundest-objects-in-the-world-created/) by using extremely round spheres of ultra-pure silicon. The technique relies on counting the silicon atoms in the spheres and needs the absolute minimal level of crystal defects for the counts to work reliably (they measure the crystal parameters very accurately and thereby derive the numbers of atoms in the spheres: defects upset the precision of this calculation). These are probably the most regular actual crystals in the world right now.


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