Does a grain of salt have exactly equal amount of sodium and chlorine?

Does a grain of salt have exactly equal amount of sodium and chlorine? I know that the formula unit of salt is 1:1, but for example if there is 10000000 atoms of sodium is it possible that that there is 9999999 atoms chlorine? Thanks.




Crystal solids, however small, have defects in them. These defects are basically irregularities in the arrangement of constituent particles. They are of two types:


* Point defects
* Line defects.


Point defects themselves are divided into other kinds of defects. Here, I'll explain only the relevant one.


One type of point defect is a vacancy defect in which some of the lattice sites in the crystal are vacant. This means that some atoms of Na or Cl or both are missing from their lattice sites. 


So the answer to your question is, yes. That scenario is very much possible.


 6

It depends what you mean by "exactly". 


A single gram of salt contains about 1022 atoms of sodium and chlorine. The important question is how much of an imbalance would be physically *noticeable*. If you can't detect the difference it isn't significant. A single atom discrepancy would be impossible to detect with the best equipment available to science. So it doesn't really matter.


More importantly most real world salt will contain a great deal of other stuff. Standard table salt might be 99.9% pure (meaning it could contain 1019 atoms of say, K or Br). But, for most purposes this is very pure and nobody will notice the extraneous elements. Sea salt is sometimes only 98% NaCl and we barely notice that difference.


For some context consider one of the purest objects ever made: the silicon sphere being developed as a new, improved, standard for weight. We have extremely good methods for making pure silicon (because of its importance in the semiconductor industry). As [this nature article](http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070528/full/news070528-2.html) says:



> 
> The researchers spent six months eliminating contaminating elements by repeatedly melting the silicon in an apparatus that does not touch the material. The resulting crystal is thought to contain **one foreign atom to every 10 million atoms of silicon.**
> 
> 
> 


This state of the art level of purity would allow a gramme of salt to have about 1015 atoms of impurities. Doing better than that is going to be tough to measure: a larger mismatch in atom count is going to be totally insignificant in any practical situation.


We might notice a significant effect if there were a significant imbalance of positive and negative ions, but it wouldn't last long as any crystal would attract opposite charged ions from the environment to make it neutral.


So overall salt contains the same number of Cl and Na ions within any practical limits of detection or effect.


 2

Yes. The amounts of Sodium and Chlorine are the same. The reason being you need to have the charge balanced.


The defects mentioned in the above answer do exist, but always in pairs. That is, for every missing Sodium atom, you have a Chlorine atom missing.


What can be said is that in 58.44 g (Molar Mass) of NaCl, you won't necessarily have Avagadro number of Sodium or Chlorine atoms. But, whatever their number, there will be equal amounts of Sodium and Chlorine.




 0

If it doesn't it isn't "salt" or at least it isn't NaCl, which requires one of each per molecule.


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