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Silicon-28 is the stable, spin-zero isotope of silicon with atomic number 14 and a mass number of 28, consisting of 14 protons and 14 neutrons in the nucleus and 14 electrons in the surrounding shells. In nature it is the overwhelmingly predominant silicon isotope, accounting for roughly 92 % of terrestrial silicon atoms, with the remainder mainly silicon-29 and silicon-30; as a result, the atomic-weight standard for elemental silicon is closely tied to the weighted contribution of Si-28. Isotopically enriched silicon-28 is produced by specialized separation processes to yield crystals whose lattice is almost entirely composed of Si-28 nuclei, and such ultra-pure material is used in precision metrology (for example, nearly monoisotopic silicon-28 spheres employed to determine Avogadro’s constant and link mass and amount-of-substance scales) and in advanced semiconductor and quantum-device research, where the absence of nuclear spin and reduced isotopic disorder in Si-28 minimize spin decoherence and phonon scattering in qubits and other nanoscale structures.
