Question
Explain how you can determine the atomic mass of an unknown metal if you know its mass density and the dimensions of a unit cell of its crystal.
Solution
By knowing the density of an unknown metal and the dimension of its unit cell, the atomic mass of the metal can be determined.
Let ‘a’ be the edge length of a unit cell of a crystal, ‘d’’ be the density of the metal, ‘m’ be the atomic mass of the metal and ‘z ’ be the number of atoms in the unit cell.