The Editors of Matter have chosen their favorite papers of the year, which included Ames Laboratory's Atomically Intimate Contact between Solid Electrolytes and Electrodes for Li Batteries, authored by Fuzhen Li, Jingxuan Li, Feng Zhu, Ting Liu, Ben Xu, Tae-Hoon Kim, Matthew J. Kramer, Cheng Ma, Lin Zhou, and Ce-Wen Nan.
Scientific Editor Jiqing Sun commented, "A non-conventional approach was proposed in this work to overcome the bad electrode-electrolyte contact issue in the solid state battery, which is a promising candidate to solve the safety issue of the solid-liquid Li batteries. They discovered that the Li-rich layered electrodes and perovskite electrolytes may form epitaxial interfaces, enabling an atomically intimate solid-solid contact, with a rate capability comparable with that of the solid-liquid composite electrode.”
(A) HAADF-STEM image of the interface between LLTO and the second-phase particle in Figure 1. The distances between the nearest neighboring atomic planes were measured to be 1.96 Å and 2.10 Å for LLTO and the second phase, respectively.
(B) εxx strain map obtained by performing GPA on the image in (A).
(C) The HAADF-STEM image in (A) overlapped with the εxx strain map in (B).
(D and E) HAADF-STEM images of regions A (D) and B (E) in (C).